Lecture Pre-colonial literature. The origins of american literature

5. The Birth of a Nation

The most memorable writing in 18^th century America was done by the Founding Fathers, the men who led the Revolution of 1775-1783 and who wrote the Constitution of 1789. None of them were writers of fiction. Rather, they were practical philosophers, and their most typical product was a political pamphlet. They both admired and were active in the European “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”. They shared the Enlightenment belief that human intelligence (or reason) could understand both nature and man. Unlike the Puritans—who saw man as a sinful failure-the enlightenment thinkers were sure that man could improve himself. They wanted to create a happy society based on justice and freedom.

Benjamin Franklin 's (1706-1790) contribution to the creation of an American national identity is perhaps the most important theme that needs to be emphasized. Franklin's abandonment of Puritanism in favor of the enlightenment's rationalism reflects a central shift in American society in the eighteenth century. In addition, his works reflect the growing awareness of America as a country with values and interests distinct from those of England – a movement that, of course, finds its climax in the Revolution.
The writings of Benjamin Franklin show the Enlightenment spirit in America at its best and most optimistic. His style is quite modern and, even today, his works are a joy to read. Although he strongly disagreed with the opinions of the Puritans, his works show a return to their “plan style”. At the same time, there is something “anti-literary” about Franklin. He had no linking for poetry and felt that writing should always have a practical purpose.
We can see these ideas even in his earliest work, the Dogood Papers (1722), written when he was only sixteen. These are a series of short pieces which are very funny, but full of moral advice (praising honesty and attacking drunkenness, etc.). His Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732-1757) gives similar advice. Almanacs, containing much useful information for farmers and sailors (about the next year’s weather, sea tides, etc.), were a popular form of practical literature. Together with the Bible and the newspaper, they were the only reading matter in most Colonial households. Franklin made his Almanac interesting by creating the character “Poor Richard”. Each new edition continued a simple but realistic story about Richard, his wife and family. He also included many “sayings” about saving money and working hard. Some of these are known to most Americans today. In 1757, Franklin collected together the best of his sayings, making them into an essay called The Way to Wealth. This little book became one of the best-sellers of the Western world and was translated into many languages.
During the first half of his adult life, Franklin worked as a printer of books and newspapers. But he was an energetic man with wide interests. As a scientist, he wrote important essays on electricity which were widely read and admired in Europe. His many inventions, his popularity as a writer and his diplomatic activity in support of the American Revolution made him world-famous in his own lifetime.
Although Franklin wrote a great deal, almost all of his important works are quite short. He invented one type of short prose which greatly influenced the development of a story-telling form in America, called the “hoax”, or the “tall tale” (latter made famous by Mark Twain). A hoax is funny because it is so clearly a lie.
Franklin’s only real book was his Autobiography. The first part of the book began in 1771 as an entertaining description of his life up to early manhood. The second part was written in 1784 when he was a tired old man and the style is more serious. Franklin now realizes the part he played in American history. The Autobiography can be used as a basis for examining the question of what it means to be an American and what the dominant American values are. Given the current debate over multiculturalism, a discussion of Franklin's career as statesman and writer as an attempt to create a unified American identity – and thus to suppress the multicultural elements in the emerging nation – should prove provocative.
Lecture 2. Literature of the revolutionary era

1. American Literature before the Revolution

The period just before the start of Revolution saw a flood of political journalism. This was mostly in the form of pamphlets rather than newspapers, because the pamphlet was cheap to publish and the author, if he wished, did not have to give his name. JAMES OTTIS (1725 – 1783) one early propagandist who used violent language more than reason in his attacks on British politics. Other pro-independence writers were JOHN DICKINSON (1732 – 1808) and JOHN ADAMS (1735 – 1826). Adams became later the second President of the United States. Other pamphlet writes ,like SAMUEL SEABURY (1729 – 1796) and DANIEL LEONARD (1740 – 1829), wrote for the pro-British side. Most of them had to escape from the country after the revolution.

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was a British pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.
Later, Paine greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against institutionalized religion, Christian doctrines, and promoted reason and freethinking, for which he would become derided in America.
In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.
Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed". At President Jefferson's invitation, in 1802 he returned to America.
Thomas Paine died, at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, New York City, on June 8, 1809, alienated due to his religious views only 6 people attended. He was buried at what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage in New Rochelle, New York, where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer, William Cobbett, who sought to return them to England and give him a heroic reburial on his native soil. The bones were, however, later lost and his final resting place today is unknown.
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States. Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806).
As a political philosopher, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and knew many intellectual leaders in Britain and France. He idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favored states' rights and a strictly limited federal government. Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786). He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for a quarter-century. Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793), and second Vice President (1797–1801).
A polymath, Jefferson achieved distinction as, among other things, a horticulturist, statesman, architect, archaeologist, inventor, and founder of the University of Virginia. When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." To date, Jefferson is the only president to serve two full terms in office without vetoing a single bill of Congress. Jefferson has been consistently ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. presidents.
Philip Morin Freneau (January 2, 1752 – December 18, 1832) was a notable American poet, nationalist, polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1771, having written the poetical History of the Prophet Jonah, and, with Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the prose satire Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca.
As the Revolutionary War approached in 1775, Freneau wrote a number of anti-British pieces. However, by 1776, Freneau left America for the West Indies, where he would spend time writing about the beauty of nature. In 1778, Freneau returned to America, and rejoined the patriotic cause. Freneau eventually became a crew member on a revolutionary privateer, and was captured in this capacity. He was held on a British prison ship for about six weeks. This unpleasant experience, detailed in his work, "The British Prison Ship" would precipitate many more patriotic and anti-British writings throughout the revolution and after.
Freneau later retired to a more rural life and wrote a mix of political and nature works. The non-political works of Freneau are a combination of neoclassicism and romanticism. His poem "The House of Night" makes its mark as one of the first romantic poems written and published in America.
2. Poets of the Revolutionary era

Poets of the Revolutionary era often imitated the “neoclassical” style and themes of the greater English poets. This style was itself taken from ancient Greek and Roman writers. Usually they wrote in couplets (two lines, ending in the same sound), but they also experimented with other forms, like blank verse (without rhyme). The neoclassical poets often used old-fashioned language in their poetry. The first poetic circle was called “Connecticut Wits”. The authors hated the democratic philosophy of Pain and Jefferson. Most of them were Federalists in their politics and Calvinists in their religion. To this group belong: John Trumbull, the best writer of satire, Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow.

In the years immediately after the Revolution, there were also some hopeful beginnings in drama. Although French and Spanish Catholic priests had used drama foe religious education among the Indians, drama developed very slowly in the English colonies. The Puritans and some other Protestant groups believed that the theatre was the “invention of Devil”, bad for the morals of people. In the South there were a few theatres. America`s first theatre was in Williamsburg, and the most active playwrights were William Dunlap with his successful plays “ The Father”, “Andre”, and Royall Tyler.

3. The Rise of a National Literature

In the early years of the new republic, there was disagreement about how American literature should grow. There were three different points of view. One group was worried about that American literature still lacked national feeling. They wanted books which expressed the special character of the nation, not books which were based on European culture. Another group felt that American literature was too young to declare its independence from the British literary tradition. They believed the US should see itself as a new branch of English culture. The third group also felt that the call for a national literature was a mistake. To them, good literature was universal, always rising above the time and place where it was written. The argument continued for almost a hundred years without any clear decision.

Novels were the first popular literature of the newly independent US. This was astonishing because almost no American novels were written before the Revolution. Like drama, the novel had been considered a “dangerous” form of literature by the American Puritans. Novels put “immoral” ideas into heads of young people.
In the early days of independence, American novels served a useful purpose. Unlike poetry, the language of these novels spoke directly to ordinary Americans. They used realistic details to describe the reality of American life. They helped Americans see themselves as a single nation. At the same time, the earliest American novelists had to be very careful. Many Americans still disapproved of the novel. The first American novel, William Hill Brown’s “Power of Sympathy” (1789), was suppressed (stopped) as morally dangerous soon after it was published. As a result, novelists tried hard to make their books acceptable. They filled them with moralistic advice and religious sentiments.
“Modern Chivalry” (1792-1815) by Hugh Henry Brackenridge was the first important novel. In the novel the author wanted to achieve “a reform in morals and manners of the people”. The book is a series of adventures in which the author laughs at America`s “backwoods” (land far from towns) culture. The hero travels around the country with his low-class servant. He experiences problems every step of the way. Although it has been called one of the great forgotten books of American literature, the awkward structure and dialogue of ”Modern Chivalry” make it rather hard to read today.
Another novelist who described the nation`s western frontier country was Gilbert Imlay. His “Emigrants” is an early example of a long line of American novels which showed American culture to be more natural and simple than the old culture of Europe. Far more interesting and important is the work of Charles Brockden Brown. His interest in the psychology of horror greatly influenced such writers as Hawthorne and Poe many years later. Like these two writers, Brown had the ability to describe complicated and very often cruel minds. “Wieland”, Brown`s best known work, was a psychological “gothic novel”- 18<sup>th</sup> century story of mystery and horror set in lonely places. The hero lives in the world of horror: murders are committed, people speak with the voices of others or suddenly explode into flames. All of his stories are filled with emotional power. Seduction (leading people into evil) is the central theme of his “Ormond” (1799), in which the evil seducer is finally killed by the heroine. The theme of “Arthur Mervyn” (1799) is the introduction of a young man to the world`s evil. The hero meets many people, including a criminal genius, but they all betray him. Towards the end, the novel becomes moralistic when the hero decides to do good. Royall Tyler also wrote one of the best realistic novels of the period. The hero of his “Algerine Captive” (1797) works on a ship carrying black slaves to America. Then the ship sinks and he himself is made a slave by pirates. The theme of the novel is an attack on the American government for its support of slavery.

4. Literature of the Post-Revolutionary era

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.

Americans were painfully aware of their excessive dependence on English literary models. The search for a native literature became a national obsession. America's literary independence was 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.
In the early part of the 19^th century, New York City was the center of American writing. Its writers were called “Knickerbockers”, and the period from 1810 to 1840 is known as the “Knickerbocker era”. The name comes from “A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker” (1809), by Washington Irving. His book created a lot of interest in the local history of New York, but it was a humorous rather than serious history of the city. Irving actually invented many events he writes about in his book. The idea was to give the region of New York City a special “local color”. But more importantly, the book is a masterpiece of comedy which laughs at the Puritans and at New York`s early Dutch governors.
Irving`s next important work, “The Sketch Book” (1819), contains two of the best loved stories from American literature: Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The plots of both stories are based on old German folk tales. But Irving fills them with the “local color” of New York`s Hudson River Valley.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851), like Washington Irving, was one of the first great American writers. Like other Romantic writers of the era, he evoked a sense of the past (in his day, the American wilderness that had preceded and coincided with early European settlement). In Cooper, one finds the powerful myth of a "golden age" and the poignance of its loss.
While Washington Irving and other American writers before and after him scoured Europe in search of its legends, castles, and great themes, Cooper helped create the essential myth of America: European history in America was a re-enactment of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm of nature was 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.
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 an Indian massacre. Young Fenimore Cooper saw frontiersmen and Indians 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 imagine Bumppo. Natty is the first famous frontiersman in American literature, and the literary forerunner of countless fictional 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 like Cooper – Natty Bumppo, an outstanding woodsman like Boone, was a peaceful man adopted by an Indian tribe. Both Boone and the fictional Bumppo loved nature and freedom. They constantly kept moving west to escape the oncoming settlers they had guided into the wilderness, and they became legends in their own lifetimes.
The unifying thread of the five novels collectively known as the Leather-Stocking Tales is the life of Natty Bumppo. Cooper's finest achievement, they constitute a vast prose epic with the North American continent as setting, Indian tribes as major actors, and great wars and westward migration as social background. The novels bring to life frontier America from 1740 to 1804. Cooper's novels portray the successive waves of the frontier settlement: the original wilderness inhabited by Indians; 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 Indians, 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 Indians who had preceded them. Cooper evokes the endless, inevitable wave of settlers, seeing not only the gains but the losses.
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.
Lecture 3. Literature of the romanticism (1^st half of the 19^th century)

1. Romanticism in America. Its peculiarities

The Romantic movement, which originated in Germany but quickly spread, reached America around the year 1820. Romantic ideas centered around the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and the importance of the individual mind and spirit. The Romantics underscored the importance of self-expressive art for the individual and society.

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 not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If one's self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering. The idea of “self,” which suggested selfishness to earlier generations, was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: "self-realization," "self-expression," "self-reliance."
As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional artistic effects and techniques were developed to evoke heightened psychological states. The “sublime” – an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop) – produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.
Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate for most American poets and creative essayists. America's vast mountains, deserts, and tropics embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit seemed particularly suited to American democracy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.
2. Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement, embodied by essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction against 18th century Rationalism, and closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, where Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of other writers lived.

In general, Transcendentalism was a liberal philosophy favoring nature over formal religious structure, individual insight over dogma, and humane instinct over social convention. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers – then or later – often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero – like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab – typically faced risk, or even certain 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. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882), the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church." The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.
Emerson is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. In Nature (1836), his first publication, the essay opens:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we [merely] through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past ...?
Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) was born in Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, near Concord. This long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically.
Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience," with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.

3. New poetic forms

An even more important development was in the area of poetic form. Through Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892), American poets finally freed themselves from the old English traditions.

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself," the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.
In this famous autobiographical essay, A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads (1889), he says, “the time had come to reflect all themes and things, old and new, in the lights thrown on them by the advent of America and democracy”. To do this, he invented a completely new and completely American form of poetic expression. To him, message was always more important than form, and he was the first to explore fully the possibilities of free verse. In his poetry the lines are not usually organized into stanzas; they look more like ordinary sentences. Although he rarely uses rhyme or meter, we can still hear (or feel) a clear rhythm.
Whitman developed his style to suit his message and the audience he hoped to reach. He wrote without the usual poetic ornaments, in a plain style, so that ordinary people could read him. He strongly believed that Americans had a special role to play in the future of mankind. Although he often disapproved of American society, he was certain that the success of American democracy was the key to the future happiness of mankind.
Even the Civil War (1861-1865) did not disturb this faith. Whitman was a strong supporter of the North. Too old to fight, he went down to the battlefield to work as a nurse. He greatly admired President Lincoln and saw him as symbol of the goodness of mankind. Whitman’s greatest poem – O Captain! My Captain! was written about the murder of Lincoln in 1865.

4. Women-writers

In 1863, when Lincoln met HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896) in Washington, he greeted her with “So, you are the little woman who made the book that made the great war”. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1825) united Northern feelings against slavery. As soon as it was published, it became a great popular success. It was translated into over 20 languages and millions of copies were sold worldwide.

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) was another New England woman who wrote during the Civil War era. But we find no mention of the war or any other great national event in her poetry. Her poetry is filled with images and themes taken from Emerson’s essays. But almost always she gives them a new and exciting interpretation. In the early 1860s, a rather different theme began to appear in her work: pain and limitation. This new theme in Dickinson was her way of expressing a terrible suffering of the Civil War.
Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the 20th century. A radical individualist, she was born and spent her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small village. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside. Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing.
Dickinson's terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman's. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Her clean, clear, chiseled poems, rediscovered in the 1950s, are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.
New England had another important woman writer, SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909). All of her realistic stories are set in New England. She was one of the leaders of the “local color” school of realism. In the period soon after the war, “local color” became an important part of American literature. It tried to show what was special about a particular region of the nation. Jewett’s characters are usually ordinary people, living in ordinary little New England towns. The way they speak and the details of their lives give us a strong feeling for New England as a place.
Jewett describes her characters realistically, and deepens them with symbolism. In A White Heron, the heron becomes the symbol of freedom and beauty.
Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, more commonly known as Margaret Fuller, (May 23, 1810 – July 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist associated with the American transcendental movement. She was the first full-time female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
Born Sarah Margaret Fuller in an area of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a substantial early education by her father, Timothy Fuller. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing what she called "conversations": discussions among women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the transcendental publication The Dial in 1840 before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. Her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She soon became involved with the revolution in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She also met Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died off Fire Island, New York, traveling back to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered.
Fuller was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Many other advocates for women's rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau, who said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Shortly after Fuller's death her importance faded; the editors who prepared her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, were not concerned about accuracy and censored or altered much of her words before publication.
5. Fiction

Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson – as well as their contemporaries, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe – represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the case of fiction writers, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the “Romance,” a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. As defined by Hawthorne, 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, as most English or continental novelists did, 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. Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe's tales are lonely protagonists 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 was the absence at the time of settled community. English novelists – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens (the great favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray – lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared, with their readers, attitudes that informed their realistic fiction.
American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. Many English novels show a poor main character rising on the economic and social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. But this plot does not challenge the aristocratic social structure of England. On the contrary, it confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainly middle-class readers of those days in England.
In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking various languages and following strange and crude ways of life. Thus, the main character in an American story might find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melville's Typee, or exploring a wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions from the grave, like Poe's solitary individuals, – or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been "loners." The democratic American individual had, as it were, to invent himself. The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well: hence the sprawling, idiosyncratic shape of Melville's novel Moby-Dick and Poe's dreamlike, wandering Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
Herman Melville was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the father. Despite his upbringing, family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself with no college education. At 19, he went to sea. His interest in sailors' lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the Taipis people in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville's masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its captain, Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale, Moby-Dick, leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a seemingly realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition.
Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Although Ahab’s quest is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson's optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary, the facts themselves tend to dissolve into symbols. Behind Melville's accumulation of facts is a mystic vision – but whether this vision is evil or good, human or inhuman, is not explained.
Ahab insists on imaging a heroic, timeless world of absolutes. Unwisely, he demands a finished “text,” an answer. But the novel shows that just as there are no finished texts, there are no final answers except, perhaps, death. Certain literary references resonate throughout the novel. Ahab, named for an Old Testament king, desires a total, Faustian, god-like knowledge. Like Oedipus in Sophocles' play, who pays tragically for wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind before he is finally killed.
Ahab's ship Pequod is named for an extinct New England Indian tribe; thus the name suggests that the boat is doomed to destruction. Whaling was in fact a major industry, especially in New England: It supplied whale oil as an energy source, especially for lamps. Thus the whale does literally “shed light” on the universe. The book has historical resonance. Whaling was inherently expansionist and linked with the historical idea of a "manifest destiny" for Americans, since it required Americans to sail round the world in search of whales (in fact, the present state of Hawaii came under American domination because it was used as the major refueling base for American whaling ships). The Pequod's crew members represent all races and various religions, suggesting the idea of America as a universal state of mind, as well as a melting pot. Finally, Ahab embodies the tragic version of democratic American individualism. He asserts his dignity as an individual and dares to oppose the inexorable external forces of the universe.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. He later changed his name to "Hawthorne", adding a "w" to dissociate from relatives including John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825; his classmates included future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children.
Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce.
WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself," the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.
The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the universe and the reader, permanently altered the course of American poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, and is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; his parents died when he was young. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. After spending a short period at the University of Virginia and briefly attempting a military career, Poe parted ways with the Allans. Poe's publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".
Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845, Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years later. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents. Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world.

6. Boston Brahmins

Brahma, in Hinduism, is the Supreme Entity of all Matter and Spirit alike. Traditional Hinduism contains five distinct castes or classes of people. A Brahman is a member of the highest, priestly caste. The other castes are, in decreasing status: Kshatriya (rulers/warriors), Vaishya (merchants), Shudra (artisans/servants), and Harijan (outside caste). People are born, married, and die in these castes. Mr. Holmes might have picked Kshatriya or Vaishya as the name for his New England Caste, if only for legacy reasons--some men in these families became eventually known as Merchant Princes in history.

The term "Boston Brahmin" has often been used to describe a group of very wealthy nineteenth century Beacon Hill families. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the original phrase in 1860. Holmes wrote a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly called The Professor's Story. In Volume 5, Issue 27, Chapter 1, The Brahmin Caste of New England, he wrote: "There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste--not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy...." This series of articles collectively became the novel Elsie Venner, published in 1861.
The object of Elsie Venner was, "an attempt to illustrate the doctrine of inherited moral responsibility for other people's misbehavior." In broad terms, this was an intentional contradiction of certain theological (Calvinist) beliefs such as pre-destination. An unintended consequence of describing a New England Caste of strict progeny, educational, religious, and business practices, was to later make the Brahmin families appear quite elitist.
Many of the Brahmin families had descended from the original Puritan settlers of Massachusetts. Holmes was a descendent of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Massachusetts in 1634, 1640, 1645, and 1650. The most well known wealthy families of nineteenth century Boston include the Appletons, Bacons, Cabots, Codmans, Coolidges, Forbes, Hunnewells, Lodges, Parkmans, Perkins, Russells, and Shaws. Old guide books exist that trace the ancient lineage of these families, and some even trace the lineage of their Beacon Hill addresses.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a Brahmin Poet, 1807-1882)
Longfellow was born in Portland. He went to Bowdoin College, where, in the later years of his course, a few poems testify to his love of nature and of legend. He was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, George B. Cheever, and J. S. C. Abbott. Like most of the literary men of his time, he intended to be a lawyer; but the offer of the professorship of modern languages in his college, determined him to go abroad and fit himself for the work. His stay covered two years.
The Voices of the Night, published in 1839, contains some of the very best of his work — poems whose simple truth and natural expression. render them popular — The Reaper and the Flowers, Woods in Winter, and The Psalm of Life. The small volume of Ballads, and other Poems, appeared in 1841. The poet's return from Europe, in 1842, was marked by the Poems on Slavery, dedicated to Channing. About this time Longfellow gave a series of lectures on Dante, illustrating them by translations from the work of the great Italian poet.
By the end of the year 1846, he had published the Spanish Student, a collection of translations called The Poets of Europe, and The Belfry of Bruges. The next year is marked by the appearance of Evangeline, the poet's favorite of all his works. Kavanagh, a novel of little power, and a volume of poems called The Seaside and the Fireside, were published in 1849; The Golden Legend, a drama, in 1851. The Song of Hiawatha (1855) raised a storm of enthusiasm and literary controversy as to the cause of its success and its probable permanence. Longfellow called the poem 'An Indian Edda;' the scene was among the Ojibways, near Lake Superior; the meter is rhymeless trochaic tetrameter. The Courtship of Miles Standish was another successful essay in hexameter, followed by The Tales of a Wayside Inn a collection of poems on various subjects; The New England Tragedies, The Divine Tragedy, and The Hanging the Crane (1874).
The closing years of Longfellow's life were rich in friendship and success, but there is an increasing seriousness in all his work. The poem, Morituri Salutamus, which he read. at the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Bowdoin, is weighty with feeling. In 1880 came Ultima Thule; in 1881 a sonnet on the death of President Garfield. Hermes Trismegistus was his last poem. He died in 1882, and was buried near the 'three friends'—Charles Sumner, Louis Agassiz, and Cornelius Felton—whom he had loved so dearly and mourned so sincerely. England has honored his genius by giving his bust a place in Westminster Abbey."
Lecture 4. Literature of the critical realism (2^nd half of the 19^th century)

1. New tendencies in literature

After the Civil War, the center of the American nation moved westwards and American tastes followed. The new literary era was one of humor and realism. The new subject matter was the American West.

The trend started with BRET HARTE, another leader of local color realism. He was a New Yorker, who had moved to California during the “Gold Rush” days of 1850s. He achieved his great success with his short story, The Luck of Roaring Camp. It is set in a dirty mining camp, filled with gamblers, prostitutes and drunks during the Gold Rush. The camp and its people are completely changed when a baby is born there. The story combines frontier vulgarity with religious imagery and yet still manages to be funny.
The reading public loved Harte’s stories about the Far West and many other writers followed his lead. The real importance of his stories is that they provided the model for all the “Westerns” which have since appeared as novels and movies.
The work of MARK TWAIN (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the best example of the new outlook. He was one of the first Western writers who were able to create the first “all-American” literature, representing the entire nation.
Being a child Twain could hear many Indian legends and listen to the stories of the black slaves. But the life of the river itself influenced him the most. The arrival of the big steamboats excited his boyhood dreams of adventure.
Like all the Western humorists, Twain’s work is filled with stories about how ordinary people trick experts, or how the weak succeed in “hoaxing” the strong. Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, is a master at this.
In 1867, Twain’s newspaper sent him to Europe and the Holy Land. When his letters were published, he became an American literary hero. The letters then became his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). The book clearly shows his “democratic” hatred of the European aristocracy. Although he is critical of Europeans, he is much more critical of American tourists in Europe. He laughs at tourists who pretend to be excited by the art treasures they see there. They are only excited because their guide books tell them they should be. He also attacks tourists in Jerusalem who show false religious feelings. In 1880, Twain tried to write another humorous book about travel in Europe, A Tramp Abroad, but it was not as fresh or as funny as the first one.
The period of the Civil war was a time when a small number of millionaire businessmen held great power in American society. The city homes of the very rich looked like palaces and people thought of this period as a new “Golden Age”. But the gold was only on the surface. Underneath, American society was filled with crime and social injustice. It was, in fact, only a “Gilded Age”: the gold was just a thin layer. Mark Twain created this phrase for his next novel, The Gilded Age (1873), co-written with Charles Warner. It was one of the first novels which tried to describe the new morality (or immorality) of post-Civil War America. One of the elements of this novel is that it creates a picture of the entire nation, rather than of just one region. Although it has a number of Twain’s typically humorous characters, the real theme is America’s loss of its old idealism. The book describes how a group of young people are morally destroyed by the dream of becoming rich.
Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a story about “bad boys”, a popular theme in American literature. The two young heroes, Tom and Huck Finn, are “bad” only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world. In the end they win. Twain creates a highly realistic background for his story. We get to know the village very well, with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which there was supposed to be a ghost. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are also important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. In his great novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain gives his young hero very adult problems. Huck and an escaped slave, Jim, are floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During their trip, in the various towns and villages along the way, Huck learns about the evil of the world. Huck, meanwhile, is facing a big moral problem. The laws of society say he must return Jim to his “owner”. But, in the most important part of the book, he decides that the slave is a man, not a “thing”. He thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. After that, he is not a child any more. Many see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the great novel of American democracy. It shows the basin goodness and wisdom of ordinary people.

2. Southern writers

The South, which was economically and spiritually destroyed by the Civil War, produced very little important literature in the post war years. The best poet was SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881). He is remembered by his Marshes of Glynn. It describes how a poet becomes closer to nature as he approaches old age. He learns from nature that death the doorway to eternity. Lanier also wrote an important book on how to write poetry, The Science of English Verse.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925) was another Southern writer. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and often toured the country with him, giving lectures. An important “local color” writer, he specialized in the life of the Creoles (French whites living in the New Orleans region). In such stories as Parson Jove, he showed the amusing differences between Creole culture and the neighboring Protestant culture of the South.
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was the most interesting Southern writer in the post-Civil war period. Although he was white, he popularized Negro folklore. In his Uncle Remus tales, an old slave tells stories to a white child. They are all animal stories, but all the animals act just like humans. The heroes are usually: a little rabbit and his old enemy fox. They symbolize slaves and their masters.
3. The rise of American realism

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) created the first theory for American realism. He had many important followers. Under him, realism became the “mainstream” of American literature. In 1891, he became the editor of Harper’s Monthly in New York City. He made Harper’s into a weapon against literary “romanticism”. He felt that such works created false views about life. And as editor, he was able to help younger novelists like Halin Galand and Stephen Crane. He was also a friend and supporter of Mark Twain and Henry James.

Howells put his realist theories into practice in his novels. The theme of A Modern Instance (1882), one of his earlier novels, shocked the public. It was about Divorce, a subject which was not talked and written about openly. His characters are very complex and very unromantic. The author blames society for their troubles. This is a position he took in many of his later novels as well.
Howells’s next novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is about an ordinary, uneducated man who becomes rich in the paint business. It describes his unsuccessful attempt to join Boston’s “high society”. In the end, his paint business is ruined because he refuses to cheat other people. The novel contains a famous scene at a dinner party, in which the characters discuss literature.
Howells hates the romantic literature of such popular writers as Frank Stockton (1834-1902) and such historical romances as Ben-Hur (1880, by Lew Wallace). Such novels “make one forget life and all its cares and duties”, he wrote. He realized that business and businessmen were at the center of the society, and felt that novels should depict them. The good realist should be interested in “the common feelings of commonplace people”.
However, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells seems to turn away from the “smiling aspects” of society. It is the story of a man who learns about the terrible suffering of poor people in society. From about this time, Howells himself was becoming a kind of socialist. This new outlook made him add a new law to his ideology of realism: art and the artist must serve the poor people of society. From then on, he began attacking the evils of American capitalism. Like Tolstoy, he argued for kindness and the unity of all people in society, rather than selfish competition. A little later, Howells began to write “utopian” novels about an ideal society with perfect justice and happiness. These included A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

4. Naturalism

In the 1890s, many realists became “naturalists”. “Naturalism” was a term created by the French novelist, Emile Zola. In studying human life, the naturalist used the discoveries and knowledge of modern science. He believed people were not really “free». Rather, their lives, opinions and morality were all controlled by social, economic and psychological causes.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) wrote the most famous American “utopian” novels. In his Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a man goes to sleep and wakes up in the year 2000. He finds an entirely new society which is much better than his own. The author’s purpose is really to criticize capitalist America of the 1880s. He is showing his fellow Americans a picture of how society could be. Today, the book seems a little too optimistic. Bellamy was sure society’s problems could be solved by a higher level of industrialization.
Stephen Crane (1871-1900), the first American naturalist, was not much influenced by the scientific approach. He was a genius with amazing sympathy and imagination. He became famous as the author of the novel Maggie: A girl of the Streets (1893). It is a sad story of a girl brought up in a poor area of New York City. She is betrayed by her family and friends and finally has to become a prostitute.
In his short story The Open Boat (1898) Crane shows how even life and death are determined by fate. After a shipwreck, four men struggle to stay alive. In the end, three live and one dies; but again, there is no pattern. Crane was also a good poet. In 1899 he wrote a collection of poems called War Is Kind.
Crane’s naturalism caused him to move far away from Howells’s “more smiling aspects of life”. In fact, this was the trend for all of the realists. One very important group went in the direction of social criticism. In The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), for example, Harold Frederic (1856-1898) attacks contemporary religion. Like other novels written in the 1890s, this one expresses deep doubts about the progress of American society.
The naturalism of Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was filled with a deep sympathy for the common people. His literature was a form of social protest. In such books as Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Garland protests against the conditions which made the lives of Mid-Western farmers so painful and unhappy. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hamlin Garland was describing the failure of the “American Dream”.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was one of America’s greatest writers, and its greatest naturalist writers. He and his characters did not attack the nation’s puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it. This attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900 and which was suppressed until 1912. The heroine, Carrie Meeber, leaves the poverty of the country home and moves to Chicago. She is completely honest about her desire for a better life. Dreiser himself was born in poverty, and therefore doesn’t criticize her for this. Nor does he criticize her relationship with men. Carrie is quite modern in the way she moves from one relationship to another. She tries to be faithful to them, but circumstances make this impossible. Almost by accident, she becomes a success as an actress. In the end, she learns that even money and success are not the keys to true happiness. As in all of his novels, Dreiser’s real theme in Sister Carrie is the purposelessness of life.
Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Dreiser” –The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (published in 1947) - shows a new development in his thinking. He had already found life to be meaningless, and morals to be absurd. Now under the influence of Niezshe, he stressed “the will of power”. The trilogy tells the story of F.A. Cowperwood, a superman of the modern business world. Although he is writing about the achievements of a single, powerful individual, Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that “the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual”. But on the other hand, Cowperwood is also a “chessman” of fate. Like Carrie, his success is mostly the result of chance.
Dreiser’s greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Much more than in Sister Carrie, he sees his characters as victims of society. Clyde Griffiths, the main hero (or anti-hero), has the same dream as Carrie: he thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant girlfriend threatens to destroy his dreams, he plans to kill her. At the last moment he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. The question is if Clyde is responsible for her death. This becomes the main point during his trial. The trial itself is not really fair. The newspapers stir up public anger against him. In the end, Clyde is executed. Dreiser believes that Clyde is not really guilty. Dreiser calls his novel a tragedy, and in certain ways it is similar to classical Greek tragedy.
Dreiser’s novels were very long. They were filled with details about factories, banks, cities and business life. Some people complained about his style. There were too many details, they said and the language was not clear.
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was more conservative. She disagreed with Dreiser’s criticism of the society and hated his “detail-piling”. She believed the novel should be without “social furniture” (details about business and politics). The author and reader should concentrate on the emotional life of the central character. Cather’s speciality was portraits of the pioneer men and women of Nebraska. She had grown up there, and the values of the old pioneer people were her values. Her famous short story Neighbor Rossicky is about the last days of a simple, hard-working immigrant farmer. After much struggle, he has a successful farm and a loving family. Then he dies and is buried in the Nebraska land he had loved so much. Cather’s most famous novels-O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark and My Antonia-all have the same Nebraska setting. Each is a success story. Between 1923 and 1925- in A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House- Cather describes the decline and fall of the great pioneer tradition. It is being defeated by a new spirit of commerce and the new kind of man: the businessman. The greed of such people is destroying. After 1927, with her famous Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather turned to historical fiction. In writing of the past she was trying to escape from the ugliness of the present.
Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945) is often compared with Willa Cather. Both novelists examined the problem of change. Glasgow, who grew up in Virginia, spent her life writing novels about her state’s past. The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella.

5. Psychological realism

Henry James (1843-1916) was a realist, but not a naturalist. Unlike Howells and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action. In fact, the characters in his last (and finest) novels rarely do anything at all. Things happen to them, but not as a result of their own actions. They watch life more than they live it. We are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story.

We usually divide James’s career as a writer into three stages: early, middle and mature. James developed toward his mature – or fully developed – style rather slowly. The novels of his early period deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. Roderick Hudson (1876) tells of the failure of a young American artist in Italy. Although he has genius, the young man fails because he lacks moral strength. Daisy Miller (1879) is the best novel of James’s “middle period”. Again, a young, bright American girl goes to Europe to “explore life”. After many good offers of marriage, she chooses the wrong man. The most important part of the book is where she realizes her mistake. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), the hero is a revolutionary who wants to destroy the European aristocracy. But gradually, he falls in love with the aristocrat’s “world of wonderful precious things». This change of heart leads to his suicide. In The Ambassadors (1903), a middle-aged American goes to Paris to rescue the son of a friend from the “evils” of European society. In the end, the boy is happy to be “rescue” and to go back to America. Henry James never tries to give a large, detailed picture of society. Rather, in his stories, he selects a single situation or problem: often the problem is about the nature of art. In his excellent short stories, we can clearly see how this method works. In The Real Thing (1893), the problem is how art changes reality. An artist wants to create a picture of typical aristocrats. When he tries to use real aristocrats as his models, he fails. The real aristocrats are so real that he can’t use his imagination. In The Death of the Lion (1894), a famous writer faces the problem of being too popular. He becomes too busy with his admirers to write.
Another kind of problem that Henry James deals with in both his short stories and novels is the “unlived life”. The hero may be so afraid of life that he cannot really live. In The Beast in the Jungle (1903), the hero is sure something terrible is going to happen to him. Much later, he discovers that the terrible fate waiting for him “is that nothing is to happen to him”. A further problem James often studied was the introduction of children to the evil and immorality of the world around them. This is the theme of What Maisie Knew
(1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). The latter is a famous ghost story about two children and their nurse. The nurse is sure the children are being haunted by ghosts, but it is not clear to the reader whether these ghosts are real or only in the nurse’s mind.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was one of the few important writers in late 19^th century America who was not a realist or a naturalist. The struggles of ordinary people in the everyday world did not interest him. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he loved to describe terrifying events and strange forms of death. His famous sport stories about the Civil War – in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) – are actually horror stories. Irony is an important element in each of them. Bierce is also similar to Poe in his control of details. Each detail in a story is part of the single, clear impression created by the whole story.
Lecture 5. Literature of the critical realism (2^nd half of the 19^th century)

1. Novelists

By the mid- 1880s, well-educated world of the Boston Brahmins was dead. Rich businessmen had replaced them. This change deeply saddened Henry Adams (1838-1918), one of the youngest members of the Brahmin group. Both his grandfather and father Presidents oh the US. He hoped to be the president too. He moved to Washington D.C. in order to make a career in politics. But all his political plans failed. Instead he wrote two novels. The first was Democracy (1880), a satire on the political and social life of the nation’s capital. His Esther (1884) was about a cultural education of a young woman. Adams was also good at history. He spent 12 years researching and writing his History of the United States of America during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison. (1889-1891). It is both a work of history and a work of art. The author used a poetic style to help his reader to feel the mood of great events, and he tried to give a scientific interpretation of the forces in human history.

Adams is best remembered for his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). On the surface, it is a guide book to two famous religious sites. But it is a deep study of medieval culture. The author examines architecture, poetry and philosophy of the 12^th and 13^th century.
In The Education of Henry Adams (1907) he describes his education as a journey. First he is in a search of a career, then he is in a search of meaning in the modern world. Both searches end in failure.
At the turn of the centuries, words and phrases like “uncontrollable forces”, “energy”, and “evolution” were appearing in other novels. Writers were greatly influenced by Zola’s “scientific” study of man, by Darwin’s theory of evolution and by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Niezsche, which attacked Christianity. Writers at the turn of the century were beginning to think about traditional social morality in a new way. Traditional values were based on the idea of the personal responsibility: the individual can and must choose between good and evil. But now writers were asking whether the individual could really make such a choice. When they looked at the many outside forces influencing a person, the area of individual choice and responsibility seemed quite small. Niezsche suggested that there were also other forces which work inside the individual. Each person, he said, has a “will of power”. This “will” is “beyond good and evil”. It is a force of nature, like hunger, or sex.
The novels of Frank Norris (1870-1902) are clearly influenced by this new way of thinking. His characters are often unable to control their own lives. The whole world, natural and human, is a battlefield between uncontrollable forces.
The Octopus (1901) is a novel about a battle between California wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad. As in The Mc Teage, we see the conflict between the power of nature (the farmers) and the mechanical forces (the railroad). The farmers are defeated by “inevitable” economic forces. In the octopus and then in The Pit (1903), Norris uses wheat as a symbol of life. He makes it almost a religious symbol. In this sense he is different from the “scientific” naturalists. His writing style is also different from that from the other naturalists. Many of his techniques for description (his repetitious and powerful language) seem closer to such romantic writers as Hawthorne.
Jack London.
Jack London (1876-1916), like Norris, was deeply influenced by Darwin’s ideas of constant struggle in nature and the “survival of the fittest”. Not surprisingly, the heroes of some of his stories are animals. In his famous Call of the Wild (1903) the dog, Buck, is taken from his easy life in California and brought to the frozen environment of Alaska. He survives because he is a “superior individual”. In the end he returns to the world of his ancestors. He became a leader of a pack of wolves. Wolf Larsen, the hero of The Sea-Wolf, is not simply a man, he is a superman. The beautiful poetess Maude Brewster becomes fascinated with him after he rescues her and takes her on board his ship. His knowledge of the sea makes him seem like a master of nature. But in the end, even this superman dies. London himself once explained that this point was that a man like Wolf Larson could not survive in modern society.
The laws of nature govern everything and everybody inside or outside society in London’s novels. Sometimes people are defeated by these laws. In his great story, To Build a Fire (1910) a man stupidly goes out into the terrible cold of an Alaskan storm. Since he has matched, he thinks he can build a fire any time. But in the end Alaskan nature defeats him and he freezes to death.

2. Pragmatism

The turn of the century was an exciting moment in American intellectual history. American novelists and poets were no longer copying British and European writers. They were now sharing ideas with the whole world. America was about to become an important contributor to world literature. A similar thing was happening in philosophy and sociology. John Dewey (1859-1952) and William James (1842-1910) developed their philosophy of “Pragmatism”. They believed that there are no fixed truths; and that the ideas are instruments which are useful only when they help change society. William James, Henry James’s elder brother, greatly influenced European philosophers with his Varieties of Religious Experience, and especially his Pragmatism. In sociology, Thorstein Veblen made an important contribution to the growing attack on the capitalist economic and social system with his Theory of the Leisure Class. According to this theory, America’s very rich do not produce the wealth of the nation; they simply use it. American economic system, Velben says, encourages competition in making money rather than in making products. After they have made their money, the rich use it wastefully. They buy expensive things in order to show other people how rich they are.

3. Social novelists

Inexpensive, popular magazines like McClure’s, Everybody’s, Cosmopolitan sent their reporters out to find the wrong-doers of politics and business. The job of these reporters was to print the truth, however unpleasant, in their magazines. They quickly moved from magazine articles to books. In the book by Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) “History of the Standard Oil Company” attacks the method John D. Rockefeller used to crush his competitors. David G. Phillips (1867-1911) covered all kids of social evils, from politics to finance. Some writers, like Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), had a social philosophy very close to that of the naturalist novelists. Some writers, like the novelist Robert Herrick (1868-1938), seemed to have a tragic view of life. In “The Common Lot” and other novels, he describes the evil growth of the commercial spirit in America, from 1890s. In great sadness, he says that the soul of the middle class is being destroyed. These people now lead empty, meaningless lives .Like many writers after him Herrick seemed to be filled with hopelessness and despair.

Upton Sinclair was the opposite of Herrick. He believed in human goodness and was sure society could be changed. His greatest novel, The Jungle, was a successful weapon in his fight for justice. It tells the story of an immigrant family, the Redkuses, who come to America with dreams of a better way of life. But they only experience a series of horrors and tragedies. Sinclair shows the terrible conditions the family experience in Chicago’s meat-packing industry. Jack London described the novel as “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage-slavery”. Indeed, it did have a similar practical effect. Millions of Americans were shocked by these descriptions. All attention forced the reform of America’s food industry. As literature, The Jungle is not very satisfactory. In almost all of his many novels, Sinclair’s characters seem very flat and lifeless. But perhaps Sinclair’s main interest was not as much in his characters as in his message. His novels were always a form of propaganda. They tried to force society to change.
This period gave the world one more writer of interest, O. Henry (1862-1910). During 1904 and 1905 he wrote one short story a week. His first collection of stories, Cabbages and Kings (1904), made him a popular hero. He usually used his own experiences as ideas for stories. Like M. Twain, he wrote in an easy-to-understand, journalistic style. His stories begin with action and move quickly toward their conclusion. They are filled with deep, loving portraits of the lives of ordinary people. The plots often seem to be written according to a formula. One such formula is the “reversal”: an action by a character produces the opposite effect from the one he had been hoping for (kidnapping). Another O. Henry formula is to keep an important piece of information from the reader until the very end. In 1914, the New York Times praised his story Municipal Report. But the author wasn’t satisfied with his stories, though millions of people liked them.
American newspapers and magazines had become very powerful by this period. They were patriotic; they wanted the US to grow in strength. Some historians say that the Spanish-American War (1898) was started by American journalists. The newspapers wanted something excited to write about. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were correspondents in the war. Correspondents like Richard Harding Davis pleased readers with stories of courage and red blood. Davis’s descriptions of battle were particularly good, like the battle of Santiago. He later collected his reports into his very popular Notes of a War Correspondent (1910). Each report told the tale of a courageous hero; sometimes a solder, sometimes a journalist. Like Hemingway, who also started as a war correspondent, Davis was admired by women readers.
Lafcadio Hearn also began as a newspaper writer. He was born in Greece and his father was British. At 19 he arrived in America without any money, and had to find a way to make a living. Soon he was a reporter for the Enquirer and later, on a New Orleans paper. His best writing described mood rather than action. He liked the contrast between brilliant light and darkness. Later he came to Caribbean islands. In his Martinique Sketches (1890), he painted this world of sunshine and bright colors with words. His best descriptions are like romantic photographs. But the world knows him best when he went to Japan and changed his name into “Koizumi Yakumo”. He also changed his style and subject matter. He had always been interested in legends and folk tales. Now he began collecting Japanese ghost stories. To tell these tails-in such books as In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan – he departed from his old poetic style and began using words simply. He began writing for the ear, rather than for the mind’s eye.
Hearn didn’t simply translate the stories, he made them into a new kind of literature. The Japanese love him for this. Although Hearn admired Japan, he wrote about both the good and the bad of the country. In Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, he praised its old society and criticized its new industrial society. He also predicted the conflict between Japan and the West. But in the history of American literature, he is the man who made the legends and tales of an unknown culture a part of American literature.

4. The Muckrakers Era

A muckraker is an individual who seeks to expose or reveal the real or apparent corruption of businesses or governments to the public. The term originates from members of the Progressive movement in America who wanted to expose the corruption and scandals in government and business. Muckrakers often wrote about impoverished people and took aim at the established institutions of society.

History: Muckrakers were a significant part of reform in the United States because of the freedom of the press provided for by the First Amendment of the Constitution. They played a huge role in the social justice movements for reform, and the campaigns to clean up cities and states, by constantly reporting and publicizing the dark corners of American society.
Beginnings: Investigative Journalism in the late 19th Century
The period of the 1890s saw the growth of the Progressive movement in the United States. Investigative journalists were an important force in the progressive movement, and one of the most powerful mediums for these investigative journalists and writers arose in the 1890s with the rapidly increasing sales of cheap magazines.
Writer and photographer Jacob August Riis published his expose, How the Other Half Lives, in 1891, thoroughly detailing the substandard conditions (such as lack of light, poor air circulation, etc.) in the slums and tenement buildings of New York City.
Origin of the Term "Muckraker"
The period 1900-1902 saw an increase in the kind of reporting that would come to be called "muckraking." By the 1900s, magazines such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Munsey's and McClure's were already in wide circulation and read avidly by the growing middle class.
The term "muckraker" was first used in a speech on April 14, 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt: “In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” This first reference to "muckrakers" is believed to have been with the Hearst magazines and newspapers in mind.
Roosevelt saw benefits and disadvantages to muckraking activity. He declared that although these men did good work when they scraped up the ‘filth’ of America, "the man who did nothing else was certain to become a force of evil.” On the other hand, he said, "I hail as a benefactor…every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in turn remembers that that attack is of use only if it absolutely truthful”.
The term eventually came to be used to depict investigative journalists who exposed the dark corners and all the corruption of American public life, especially in corporate America.
As mentioned before, the Muckrakers were part of the social justice movement during the Progressive era. During this time period, these journalists, through their research and constant exposure of the wrongdoing by officials in American public life, gave fuel to protests that led to investigations and later on reform of not only Corporate America but the American Government. The Muckrakers’ journalistic efforts helped reform and regulate Wall Street and aspects of big businesses. The muckrakers also shed light on an array of social issues, such as the issues with urban housing and horrible living conditions in highly populated cities, medical patents, child labor laws, child prostitution, and even women’s rights.
Lecture 6. Literature of the “lost generation” (20-30s of the 20^th century)

1. Self-criticism

As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American literature seemed to have stopped. The realistic novels were beginning to seem old-fashioned. The novels of Winston Churchill (1871-1947) were typical of the tastes of the American reading public. His most popular works-The Crisis and The Crossing - had old-fashioned, romantic plots. They expressed sadness at the passing of the aristocratic culture of the South after the Civil War. Also popular was James Branch Cable (1879-1958). His novels were romantic, written in an elegant, 19^th -century prose style. In them he helped his readers escape from the reality of the present into an unreal past. In such novels and collections of stories as Gallantry, Chivalry and the Soul of Melicent, he succeeded in his desire to “write beautifully of beautiful happenings”. Although his books are often delightful in themselves, they did not provide the new direction needed by the new generation of American writers.

Starting in 1915 the critic Van Wyck Brooks opened a period of “self-criticism”, in which writers looked at what was wrong with the nation and its literature. Brooks knew that such literary criticism would sooner or later become social criticism. He wrote that the American life was divided between the businessman (who only thinks of making money) and the intellectual (who only has unpractical theories and ideas). But because they don’t understand each other, there is no “middle ground” where they can meet. The new generation of American writers must construct this “middle ground”.
Young writers took notice of Brooks’s criticism. The result was the trend “new realism”, which lasted up to the 1950s. It made American literature one of the most exciting and influential literatures of the world. Brooks reviewed and reorganized American literature. He wrote famous biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James. His theory was that they were failures because their environment had prevented their development as true artists.
American readers were beginning to lose their fear of those who looked below the surface of human relationships. Intelligent readers were now able to accept even ugly truths about human nature. In 1919, Sigmund Freud had given a famous lecture series in America. This series was both a liberation and an inspiration for American artists. But even before Freud’s arrival, two American novelists were starting to destroy the “double Standard” of America’s puritanical morality: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser.
Edith Wharton (1862- 1937) was born in an old New York family. She married a man of her own class, but later she left him and moved to Europe to begin a career as a writer. All of her stories are set in the puritanical world of the upper classes. Many people notice a strong similarity between her stories and those of her friend and teacher Henry James. They both wrote psychological novels, usually about the problems of women in upper-class society. However, Wharton’s style is more direct than James’s. She can describe a whole way of life by describing a few surface details, and in a few words she can “catch” (often humorously) the personality of her characters. Many of Wharton’s novels are about the life and customs of upper-class society. But angry social criticism is not far beneath the surface. The life of Lily Bart, heroine of The House of Mirth, is actually a battle. She has been brought up to see herself as a decorative object for wealthy men. But she hates spending time with them. When she tries to act with a little bit of freedom, society rejects her as immoral. In the end, she fails to get a husband, and kills herself. The heroine of The House of the Country is quite open about her own sexual desires. She knows exactly how to use her attractions to get a wealthy husband. Wharton is attacking here the Victorian world of her own youth. She continuous her theme of dishonesty about one’s emotions and sexual feelings in her most famous novel Ethan Frome (1911). The theme is not expressed directly. Instead it lies just below the surface in scenes of great tension. Ethan, a New England farmer, has a cold unsatisfactory relation with his wife. A young cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them. Ethan and the girl Mattie are drawn to each other. But in scene after scene we see them denying their desires. Finally they try to kill themselves, but they fail. In the end Mattie (now cripple), Ethan (now elderly) and the wife all share a strange and terrible life together in the tiny farmhouse. The Reef and Summer are two more novels about sexual passion. In all of her works, the natural instincts of people are crushed by an untruthful society. But her characters still have room for moral choice. This makes her different from the pure naturalists writers like Crane and Dreiser.
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was more conservative. She disagreed with Dreiser’s criticism of the society and hated his “detail-piling”. She believed the novel should be without “social furniture” (details about business and politics). The author and reader should concentrate on the emotional life of the central character. Cather’s speciality was portraits of the pioneer men and women of Nebraska. She had grown up there, and the values of the old pioneer people were her values. Her famous short story Neighbor Rossicky is about the last days of a simple, hard-working immigrant farmer. After much struggle, he has a successful farm and a loving family. Then he dies and is buried in the Nebraska land he had loved so much. Cather’s most famous novels-O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark and My Antonia-all have the same Nebraska setting. Each is a success story. Between 1923 and 1925- in A Lost Lady and The Professor’s House- Cather describes the decline and fall of the great pioneer tradition. It is being defeated by a new spirit of commerce and the new kind of man: the businessman. The greed of such people is destroying. After 1927, with her famous Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather turned to historical fiction. In writing of the past she was trying to escape from the ugliness of the present.
Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945) is often compared with Willa Cather. Both novelists examined the problem of change. Glasgow, who grew up in Virginia, spent her life writing novels about her state’s past. The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella.

2. American modernist literature

Modernist literature in America dealt with such topics as racial relationships, gender roles and sexuality, to name just a few. It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s. Among the representative writers of the period we may find Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, although one should mention also Walt Whitman, who, even if he belongs to the 19th century poets, is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.

Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as the self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun".
Racial relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the actual facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), or about drama Eugene O'Neil. In other words, such stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language and their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is concerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler", for example, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.
Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite theme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neil's "Emperor Jones", Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun", all deal to a certain extent with this topic.
The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.
Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath". Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. Shocked and permanently changed, Americans soldiers returned to their homeland, but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life.
In the postwar “big boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education – in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world's highest national average income in this era.
Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition – a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – began in 1919, illegal “speakeasies” (bars) and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, movie going, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.
In spite of this prosperity, Western youths on the cultural “edge” were in a state of intellectual rebellion, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, as well as the older generation they held responsible. Ironically, difficult postwar economic conditions in Europe allowed Americans with dollars – like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound – to live abroad handsomely on very little money, and to soak up the postwar disillusionment, as well as other European intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism.
Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of what American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein dubbed "the lost generation." In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem "The Waste Land" (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal). These people include Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill.
It is said that people in the 1920s believed in everything, people in the 1930s believed in one thing, and people in the 1940s believed in nothing.
Robert Frost (1874—1963) was born in San Francisco, but known as a New England poet. When he was 10, his father died of T. B. and the family carried his body to be buried in New England, and they were too poor to go back to San Francisco.
Frost entered Dartmouth College, but soon left; later on he tried college again at Harvard, but left at the end of two years, bearing an enduring dislike for academic convention. Then he lived by farming, at the same time writing poetry. He got T. B., and began to live in the countryside at the suggestion of a doctor. He used to say he was one and a half men—a half teacher, a half farmer, and a half poet.
It took 20 years for him to get recognition. His first volume of poetry was published in England in 1913, with the help of Ezra Pound, which was entitled A Boy’s Will. When he went back to his home country, he found himself famous. He later received honorary degrees from 44 colleges and universities, won the Pulitzer Prize four times, and was invited to read his poem at the inauguration of President J. F. Kennedy in 1961.

3. Experimentation

Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published "Three Lives", an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music. Stein labeled a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Lost Generation".

The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of "The Waste Land" come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in "The Great Gatsby", is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrote novels with critical depictions of American life. John Dos Passos wrote about the war and also the U.S.A. trilogy which extended into the Depression.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized grace under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states, a technique called "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seemingly chaotic structure conceals multiple layers of meaning.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are "The Sound and the Fury", "Absalom, Absalom!", "Go Down, Moses", and "The Unvanquished".
Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, where he set many of his stories. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life; he was probably the most socially aware writer of his period. "The Grapes of Wrath", considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. Other popular novels include "Tortilla Flat", "Of Mice and Men", "Cannery Row", and "East of Eden". He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Other writers sometimes considered part of the proletarian school include Nathanael West, Fielding Burke, Jack Conroy, Tom Kromer, Robert Cantwell, Albert Halper, and Edward Anderson.
Henry Miller assumed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels, written and published in Paris, were banned from the US. Although his major works, which include Tropic of Cancer (novel) and Black Spring, wouldn't be cleared for American sale and publication until 1962, their themes and stylistic innovations had already exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers.

4. Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Group publication of work under the Imagist name appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in modernist poetry in English, as well as a number of other Modernist figures prominent in fields other than poetry.

Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, the Imagists featured a number of women writers among their major figures. Imagism is also significant historically as the first organised Modernist English language literary movement or group. In the words of T. S. Eliot: "The point de repère usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910."
At the time Imagism emerged, Longfellow and Tennyson were considered the paragons of poetry, and the public valued the sometimes moralising tone of their writings. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. The focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.
The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to the group in April 1909, and found that their ideas were close to his own. In particular, Pound's studies of Romantic literature had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti, amongst others. For example, in his 1911–12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone En breu brizara'l temps braus): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".^[6] These criteria of directness, clarity and lack of rhetoric were to be amongst the defining qualities of Imagist poetry. Through his friendship with Laurence Binyon, Pound had already developed an interest in Japanese art and he quickly became absorbed in the study of Japanese verse forms.
In a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator René Taupin, Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism, pointing out that Hulme was, in many ways, indebted to a Symbolist tradition, linking back via William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmé.^[7] In 1915, Pound edited the poetry of another '90s poet, Lionel Johnson for the publisher Elkin Mathews. In his introduction, he wrote
Early publications and statements of intent
In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets to the Eiffel Tower group, his former fiancée Hilda Doolittle (who had started signing her work H.D.) and her future husband Richard Aldington. These two were interested in exploring Greek poetic models, especially Sappho, an interest that Pound shared. The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D. and Aldington that they were Imagistes, and even appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to some poems they were discussing.
When Harriet Monroe started her Poetry magazine in 1911, she had asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the Imagiste rubric. That same month, Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems, Choricos, To a Greek Marble, and Au Vieux Jardin, were in the November issue of Poetry and H.D.'s, Hermes of the Ways, Orchard, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue; Imagism as a movement was launched. Poetry's April issue published what came to be seen as "Imagism's enabling text", the haiku-like poem of Ezra Pound entitled "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The March issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and Flint's Imagisme. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:

1. 
   Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
   
2. 
   To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
   
3. 
   As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
   

Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound goes on to state that It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. His list of don'ts reinforced Flint's three statements, while warning that they should not be considered as dogma but as the result of long contemplation. Taken together, these two texts comprised the Imagist programme for a return to what they saw as the best poetic practice of the past.
Des Imagistes
Determined to promote the work of the Imagists, and particularly of Aldington and H.D., Pound decided to publish an anthology under the title Des Imagistes. This was published in 1914 by the Poetry Bookshop in London, and became one of the most important and influential English language collections. Included in the thirty-seven poems were ten poems by Aldington, seven by H.D., and six by Pound. The book also included work by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos.
Pound's editorial choices were based on what he saw as the degree of sympathy that these writers displayed with Imagist precepts, rather than active participation in a group as such. Williams, who was based in the United States, had not participated in any of the discussions of the Eiffel Tower group. However, he and Pound had long been corresponding on the question of the renewal of poetry along similar lines. Ford was included at least partly because of his strong influence on Pound as the younger poet made the transition from his earlier, Pre-Raphaelite influenced, style towards a harder, more modern way of writing. The inclusion of a poem by Joyce, I Hear an Army which was sent to Pound by W.B. Yeats, took on a wider importance in the history of literary modernism as the subsequent correspondence between the two led to the serial publication, at Pound's behest, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist. Joyce's poem is not written in free verse, but in rhyming quatrains. However, it strongly reflects Pound's interest in poems written to be sung to music, such as the troubadours and Cavalcanti. The book met with little popular or critical success, at least partly because it had no introduction or commentary to explain what the poets were attempting to do, and a number of copies were returned to the publisher.
Some Imagist Poets
The following year, Pound and Flint fell out over their different interpretations of the history and goals of the group arising from an article on the history of Imagism written by Flint and published in The Egoist in May 1915. Flint was at pains to emphasise the contribution of the Eiffel Tower poets, especially Storer. Pound, who believed that the "Hellenic hardness" that he saw as the distinguishing quality of the poems of H.D. and Aldington was likely to be diluted by the "custard" of Storer, was to play no further direct role in the history of the Imagists. He went on to co-found the Vorticists with his friend the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis.
Around this time, the American Imagist Amy Lowell moved to London, determined to promote her own work and that of the other Imagist poets. Lowell was a wealthy heiress from Boston who loved Keats and cigars. She was also an enthusiastic champion of literary experiment who was willing to use her money to publish the group. Lowell was determined to change the method of selection from Pound's autocratic editorial attitude to a more democratic manner. This new editorial policy was stated in the Preface to the first anthology to appear under her leadership: "In this new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of our former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form." The outcome was a series of Imagist anthologies under the title Some Imagist Poets. The first of these appeared in 1915, planned and assembled mainly by H.D. and Aldington. Two further issues, both edited by Lowell, were published in 1916 and 1917. These three volumes featured most of the original poets with the exception of Pound, who had tried to persuade her to drop the Imagist name from her publications and who sardonically dubbed this phase of Imagism "Amy-gism."
Lowell persuaded D. H. Lawrence to contribute poems to the 1915 and 1916 volumes, making him the only writer to publish as both a Georgian poet and an Imagist. Marianne Moore also became associated with the group during this period. However, with World War I as a backdrop, the times were not easy for avant-garde literary movements (Aldington, for example, spent much of the war at the front), and the 1917 anthology effectively marked the end of the Imagists as a movement.
The Imagists after Imagism
In 1929, Walter Lowenfels jokingly suggested that Aldington should produce a new Imagist anthology. Aldington, by now a successful novelist, took up the suggestion and enlisted the help of Ford and H.D. The result was the Imagist Anthology 1930, edited by Aldington and including all the contributors to the four earlier anthologies with the exception of Lowell, who had died, Cannell, who had disappeared, and Pound, who declined. The appearance of this anthology initiated a critical discussion of the place of the Imagists in the history of 20th-century poetry.
Of the poets who were published in the various Imagist anthologies, Joyce, Lawrence and Aldington are now primarily remembered and read as novelists. Marianne Moore, who was at most a fringe member of the group, carved out a unique poetic style of her own that retained an Imagist concern with compression of language. William Carlos Williams developed his poetic along distinctly American lines with his variable foot and a diction he claimed was taken "from the mouths of Polish mothers". Both Pound and H.D. turned to writing long poems, but retained much of the hard edge to their language as an Imagist legacy. Most of the other members of the group are largely forgotten outside the context of the history of Imagism.
Legacy
Despite the movement's short life, Imagism would deeply influence the course of modernist poetry in English. Aldington, in his 1941 memoir, writes: "I think the poems of Ezra Pound, H.D., Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford will continue to be read. And to a considerable extent T. S. Eliot and his followers have carried on their operations from positions won by the Imagists." On the other hand, Wallace Stevens found shortcomings in the Imagist approach: "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."
The influence of Imagism can be seen clearly in the work of the Objectivist poets,^[23] who came to prominence in the 1930s under the auspices of Pound and Williams. The Objectivists worked mainly in free verse. Clearly linking Objectivism's principles with Imagism's, Louis Zukofsky insisted, in his introduction to the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry, on writing "which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." Zukofsky was a major influence on the Language poets, who carried the Imagist focus on formal concerns to a high level of development. Basil Bunting, another Objectivist poet, was a key figure in the early development of the British Poetry Revival, a loose movement that also absorbed the influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets.
Imagism influenced a number of poetry circles and movements in the 1950s, especially the Beat generation, the Black Mountain poets, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In his seminal 1950 essay, Projective Verse, Charles Olson, the theorist of the Black Mountain group, wrote "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION"; his credo derived from and supplemented the Imagists.
Among the Beats, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg in particular were influenced by the Imagist emphasis on Chinese and Japanese poetry. William Carlos Williams was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets, encouraging poets like Lew Welch and writing an introduction for the book publication of Ginsberg's Howl (1955).
Karl Edd, a Denver Colorado poet identifying himself as an Imagist, was active in the 60s and 70s and published various 'point of view' collections based around characters such as Booker T. Washington and Billy the Kid. He also published anthologies of Colorado poets entitled "Mustang Review." Edd was a member of the Colorado Author's League, and received their Poetry Award in 1969-1970 for his poems "Sometime" and "I Stood Morning Watch." Many of his works are held by the Denver Public Library.
Lecture 7. Literature of the post-world war ii period

1. The Turning Point of American Literature

The period in time from the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw to the publication of some of the most popular works in American history. The last few of the more realistic Modernists along with the wildly Romantic Beatniks largely dominated the period, while the direct respondents to America’s involvement in World War II contributed in their notable influence.

Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become the most influential novelist in America in the decades following World War II. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow painted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters peopling it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
From J.D. Salinger’s "Nine Stories" and "The Catcher in the Rye" to Sylvia Plath’s "The Bell Jar", America’s madness was placed to the forefront of the nation’s literary expression. Émigré Authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with "Lolita", forged on with the theme, and, at almost the same time, the Beatniks took a concerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors.
Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969). "MacBird", written by Barbara Garson, was another well-received work exposing the absurdity of war.
In contrast, John Updike showcased what could be called the more idyllic side of American life, approaching it from a quiet, but subversive writing style. His 1960 book Rabbit, Run broke new ground on its release by its characterization and detail of the American middle class. It is also credited as one of the first novels to ever use the present tense in its narration.
Ralph Ellison's 1953 novel “Invisible Man” was instantly recognized as among the most powerful and sensational works of the immediate post-war years. The story of a black man in the urban north, the novel laid bare the often repressed racial tension still prevailing in the nation while also succeeding as an existential character study.
Flannery O'Connor (b. March 25, 1925 in Georgia – d. August 3, 1964 in Georgia) also explored and developed the theme of 'the South' in American literature that was dear to Mark Twain and other leading authors of American literary history ("Wise Blood" 1952; "The Violent Bear It Away" 1960; "Everything That Rises Must Converge" - her best known short story, and an eponymous collection published posthumously in 1965).

2. The New Criticism in America

From the 1930s to the 1960s, New Criticism became a critical force in the United States. It was the most powerful perspective in American literary criticism. The representatives were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren. "The influential critical methods these poet-professors developed emphasized the sharpening of close reading skills. New Criticism privileged the evaluation of poetry as the justification of literary scholarship". "Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry" (1938) became one of the most influential college poetry textbooks of the 1930s and continued to be revised and reprinted well into the 1970s" (Morrisson: 29).

New Criticism showed itself in such works as Eliot’s and Yeats’ poems. "Poetry that best fit the aesthetic criteria of the New Critics was emphasized in important classroom teaching anthologies" (Morrisson: 29).T. S. Eliot redefined tradition in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". He formulated such critical concepts as "objective correlative", and rethought the literary canon in his elevation of Jacobean drama and metaphysical poetry. His work had a fundamental influence on New Criticism in America.

3. African American literature

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among the top writers in the United States. Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality. African American writing has also tended to incorporate within itself oral forms such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues and rap.

As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, too, have the foci of African American literature. Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the subgenre of slave narratives. At the turn of the 20th century, books by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.
Characteristics and themes:
In broad terms, African American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States of America. However, just as African American history and life is extremely varied, so too is African American literature. That said, African American literature has generally focused on themes of particular interest to Blacks in the United States, such as the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American. As Princeton University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African-American studies, including African American literature, "speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all." As such, it can be said that African American Literature explores the very issues of freedom and equality which were long denied to Negros in the United States, along with further themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home and more.
African American literature constitutes a vital branch of the literature of the African diaspora, with African American literature both being influenced by the great African diasporic heritage and in turn influencing African diasporic writings in many countries. In addition, African American literature exists within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, even though scholars draw a distinctive line between the two by stating that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."
African American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, African American gospel music, blues and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence and alliteration. African American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.
However, while these characteristics and themes exist on many levels of African American literature, they are not the exclusive definition of the genre and don't exist within all works within the genre. In addition, there is resistance to using Western literary theory to analyze African American literature. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the most important African American literary scholars, once said, "My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."^[8]

4. History: Early African American literature

Just as African American history predates the emergence of the United States as an independent country, so too does African American literature have similarly deep roots.

Lucy Terry is the author of the oldest piece of African American literature known which was "Bars Fight", 1746. This poem was not published until 1855 in Josiah Holland's "History of Western Massachusetts". Also, Briton Hammon's "The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverence of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man", 1760. Poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–84), who published her book Poems on Various Subjects in 1773, three years before American independence. Born in Senegal, Africa, Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery at the age of seven. Brought to America, she was owned by a Boston merchant. Even though she initially spoke no English, by the time she was sixteen she had mastered the language. Her poetry was praised by many of the leading figures of the American Revolution, including George Washington, who personally thanked her for a poem she wrote in his honor. Despite this, many white people found it hard to believe that a Black woman could be so intelligent as to write poetry. As a result, Wheatley had to defend herself in court by proving she actually wrote her own poetry. Some critics cite Wheatley's successful defense as the first recognition of African American literature.
Another early African American author was Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?). Hammon, considered the first published Black writer in America, published his poem "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries" as a broadside in early 1761. In 1778 he wrote an ode to Phillis Wheatley, in which he discussed their shared humanity and common bonds. In 1786, Hammon gave his well-known Address to the Negroes of the State of New York. Hammon wrote the speech at age seventy-six after a lifetime of slavery and it contains his famous quote, "If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves." Hammon's speech also promoted the idea of a gradual emancipation as a way of ending slavery.^[10] It is thought that Hammon stated this plan because he knew that slavery was so entrenched in American society that an immediate emancipation of all slaves would be difficult to achieve. Hammon apparently remained a slave until his death. His speech was later reprinted by several groups opposed to slavery.
William Wells Brown (1814–84) and Victor Séjour (1817–74) produced the earliest works of fiction by African American writers. Séjour was born free in New Orleans and moved to France at the age of 19. There he published his short story "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto") in 1837; the story represents the first known fiction by an African American, but written in French and published in a French journal, it had apparently no influence on later American literature. Séjour never returned to African American themes in his subsequent works. Brown, on the other hand, was a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. Brown wrote what is considered to be the first novel by an African American, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853). The novel is based on what was at that time considered to be a rumor about Thomas Jefferson fathering a daughter with his slave, Sally Hemings.
However, because the novel was published in England, the book is not considered the first African American novel published in the United States. This honor instead goes to Harriet Wilson, whose novel Our Nig (1859) details the difficult lives of Northern free Blacks.
Slave narratives: A subgenre of African American literature which began in the middle of the 19th century is the slave narrative. At the time, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue, with books like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery, while the so-called Anti-Tom literature by white, southern writers like William Gilmore Simms represented the pro-slavery viewpoint.
To present the true reality of slavery, a number of former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass wrote slave narratives, which soon became a mainstay of African American literature. Some six thousand former slaves from North America and the Caribbean wrote accounts of their lives, with about 150 of these published as separate books or pamphlets.
Slave narratives can be broadly categorized into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif. Many of them are now recognized as the most literary of all 19th-century writings by African Americans, with two of the best-known being Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861).
Frederick Douglass. While Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–95) first came to public attention as an orator and as the author of his autobiographical slave narrative, he eventually became the most prominent African American of his time and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American history.
Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass eventually escaped and worked for numerous abolitionist causes. He also edited a number of newspapers. Douglass' best-known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845. At the time some critics attacked the book, not believing that a black man could have written such an eloquent work. Despite this, the book was an immediate bestseller. Douglas later revised and expanded his autobiography, which was republished as My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In addition to serving in a number of political posts during his life, he also wrote numerous influential articles and essays.

5. Post-slavery era

After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African American authors continued to write nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans in the country.

Among the most prominent of these writers is W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), one of the original founders of the NAACP. At the turn of the century, Du Bois published a highly influential collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk. The book's essays on race were groundbreaking and drew from DuBois's personal experiences to describe how African Americans lived in American society. The book contains Du Bois's famous quote: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Du Bois believed that African Americans should, because of their common interests, work together to battle prejudice and inequity.
Another prominent author of this time period is Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), who in many ways represented opposite views from Du Bois. Washington was an educator and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a Black college in Alabama. Among his published works are Up From Slavery (1901), The Future of the American Negro (1899), Tuskegee and Its People (1905), and My Larger Education (1911). In contrast to Du Bois, who adopted a more confrontational attitude toward ending racial strife in America, Washington believed that Blacks should first lift themselves up and prove themselves the equal of whites before asking for an end to racism. While this viewpoint was popular among some Blacks (and many whites) at the time, Washington's political views would later fall out of fashion.
A third writer who gained attention during this period in the US, though not a US citizen, was the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a newspaper publisher, journalist, and crusader for Pan Africanism through his organization the UNIA. He encouraged people of African ancestry to look favorably upon their ancestral homeland. He wrote a number of essays published as editorials in the UNIA house organ the Negro World newspaper. Some of his lecture material and other writings were compiled and published as nonfiction books by his second wife Amy Jacques Garvey as the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey Or, Africa for the Africans (1924) and More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1977).
Paul Laurence Dunbar, who often wrote in the rural, black dialect of the day, was the first African American poet to gain national prominence. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. Much of Dunbar's work, such as When Malindy Sings (1906), which includes photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Joggin' Erlong (1906) provide revealing glimpses into the lives of rural African-Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, essayist, novelist (among them The Uncalled, 1898 and The Fanatics, 1901) and short story writer.
Even though Du Bois, Washington, and Garvey were the leading African American intellectuals and authors of their time, other African American writers also rose to prominence. Among these is Charles W. Chesnutt, a well-known short story writer and essayist.

6. Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 brought new attention to African American literature. While the Harlem Renaissance, based in the African American community in Harlem in New York City, existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture—with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works in fields from jazz to theater—the renaissance is perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it.

Among the most famous writers of the renaissance is poet Langston Hughes. Hughes first received attention in the 1922 poetry collection, The Book of American Negro Poetry. This book, edited by James Weldon Johnson, featured the work of the period's most talented poets (including, among others, Claude McKay, who also published three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom and a collection of short stories). In 1926, Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930 a novel, Not Without Laughter. Perhaps, Hughes' most famous poem is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which he wrote as a young teen. His single, most recognized character is Jesse B. Simple, a plainspoken, pragmatic Harlemite whose comedic observations appeared in Hughes's columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) is, perhaps, the best-known collection of Simple stories published in book form. Until his death in 1967, Hughes published nine volumes of poetry, eight books of short stories, two novels, and a number of plays, children's books, and translations.
Another famous writer of the renaissance is novelist Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Altogether, Hurston wrote 14 books which ranged from anthropology to short stories to novel-length fiction. Because of Hurston's gender and the fact that her work was not seen as socially or politically relevant, her writings fell into obscurity for decades. Hurston's work was rediscovered in the 1970s in a famous essay by Alice Walker, who found in Hurston a role model for all female African American writers.
While Hurston and Hughes are the two most influential writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, a number of other writers also became well known during this period. They include Jean Toomer, who wrote Cane, a famous collection of stories, poems, and sketches about rural and urban Black life, and Dorothy West, author of the novel The Living is Easy, which examined the life of an upper-class Black family. Another popular renaissance writer is Countee Cullen, who described everyday black life in his poems (such as a trip he made to Baltimore, which was ruined by a racial insult). Cullen's books include the poetry collections Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927). Frank Marshall Davis's poetry collections Black Man's Verse (1935) and I am the American Negro (1937), published by Black Cat Press, earned him critical acclaim. Author Wallace Thurman also made an impact with his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which focused on intraracial prejudice between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans.
The Harlem Renaissance marked a turning point for African American literature. Prior to this time, books by African Americans were primarily read by other Black people. With the renaissance, though, African American literature—as well as black fine art and performance art—began to be absorbed into mainstream American culture.

7. Civil Rights Movement era

A large migration of African Americans began during World War I, hitting its high point during World War II. During this Great Migration, Black people left the racism and lack of opportunities in the American South and settled in northern cities like Chicago, where they found work in factories and other sectors of the economy.^[11]

This migration produced a new sense of independence in the Black community and contributed to the vibrant Black urban culture seen during the Harlem Renaissance. The migration also empowered the growing American Civil Rights movement, which made a powerful impression on Black writers during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Just as Black activists were pushing to end segregation and racism and create a new sense of Black nationalism, so too were Black authors attempting to address these issues with their writings.
One of the first writers to do so was James Baldwin, whose work addressed issues of race and sexuality. Baldwin, who is best known for his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, wrote deeply personal stories and essays while examining what it was like to be both Black and homosexual at a time when neither of these identities was accepted by American culture. In all, Baldwin wrote nearly 20 books, including such classics as Another Country and The Fire Next Time.
Baldwin's idol and friend was author Richard Wright, whom Baldwin called "the greatest Black writer in the world for me". Wright is best known for his novel Native Son (1940), which tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black man struggling for acceptance in Chicago. Baldwin was so impressed by the novel that he titled a collection of his own essays Notes of a Native Son, in reference to Wright's novel. However, their friendship fell apart due to one of the book's essays, "Everybody's Protest Novel," which criticized Native Son for lacking credible characters and psychological complexity. Among Wright's other books are the autobiographical novel Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), and White Man, Listen! (1957).
The other great novelist of this period is Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953. Even though Ellison did not complete another novel during his lifetime, Invisible Man was so influential that it secured his place in literary history. After Ellison's death in 1994, a second novel, Juneteenth (1999), was pieced together from the 2,000-plus pages he had written over 40 years. A fuller version of the manuscript will be published as Three Days Before the Shooting (2008). Jones, Edward " The Known World", 2003 Carter Stephen, "New England White" 2007 Wright W.D. "Crisis of the Black Intellectual",2007
The Civil Rights time period also saw the rise of female Black poets, most notably Gwendolyn Brooks, who became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize when it was awarded for her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen. Along with Brooks, other female poets who became well known during the 1950s and '60s are Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.
During this time, a number of playwrights also came to national attention, notably Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun focuses on a poor Black family living in Chicago. The play won the 1959 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Another playwright who gained attention was Amiri Baraka, who wrote controversial off-Broadway plays. In more recent years, Baraka has become known for his poetry and music criticism.
It is also worth noting that a number of important essays and books about human rights were written by the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the leading examples of these is Martin Luther King, Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail".

Lecture 8. Literature of the beat generation

1. "Beat" culture

The Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"). Central elements of "Beat" culture include rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality.

The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York. Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. During the 1960s, the rapidly expanding Beat culture underwent a transformation: the Beat Generation gave way to the Sixties Counterculture, which was accompanied by a shift in public terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie."

2. Writers

The press often used the term "Beat" in reference to a small group of writers and artists, the friends of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs and sometimes Corso. A slightly wider definition would expand it to include other similar poets from New York, but still regard the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets as separate movements.

Defined more broadly, the "Beat" category would include all of these sub-groups, and many other writers who reached prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who shared many of the same themes, ideas, and intentions (dedication to spontaneity, open-form composition, subjectivity, and so on); even though they might have little social connection with the core group, and many might deny that they were ever a part of the "Beat Generation."
The main figures and early writers of the Beats were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Peter Orlovsky, and John Clellon Holmes. Certain poets the core Beats encountered in San Francisco were associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harold Norse, Kirby Doyle, Michael McClure. The poets associated with the Black Mountain College were also associated with the Beat Generation, such as Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan (though Duncan was one of the most vocal early critics of the "Beat Generation" label). As well, there were the New York School poets such as Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch; surrealist poets Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans; and, poets who are occasionally called the "second wave" of the Beat Generation such as LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman.
Other people associated with the Beats include Bob Kaufman, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Hubert Selby, Jr., John Wieners, Jack Micheline, A. D. Winans, Ray Bremser and Bonnie Bremser/Brenda Frazer, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer, David Meltzer, Richard Brautigan, Lenore Kandel. Many previously underappreciated female writers were part of the Beat scene, such as Joanne Kyger, Kaye McDonough, Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, Janine Pommy Vega, Elise Cowen. A few younger writers who were acquaintances of the aforementioned writers (such as Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Jim Carroll, Ron Padgett) are occasionally included in this list. Charles Bukowski has a tenuous place on this list since his association is slight. Several older writers were very closely associated with members of the "Beat Generation," though their reputations were solidified so much earlier that it is difficult to call them part of the same "generation." They include Kenneth Rexroth, the principal figure involved in the San Francisco Renaissance, and Charles Olson, the mentor to the Black Mountain poets and author of the highly influential essay "Projective Verse." Also, so many of these writers either studied personally with William Carlos Williams or looked up to Williams as an idol, that Beat writers are often seen as being the children of Williams.

3. Characteristics

The Beat Generation works highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences; in a seeming paradox, the Beats often emphasized a spiritual yearning, using concepts and imagery from Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, and so on. Thus members of the Beat Generation sought a synthesis of the "beaten down" and the "beatific," as Kerouac described it. One of the best-publicized aspects of Beat writing is the continual challenge to the limits of free expression; the Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.

The language and topics (drug use, sexuality, aberrant behavior) pushed the boundaries of acceptability in the conformist 1950's. The first "Beat" work to gain nationwide attention was Ginsberg's Howl based partly on its graphic sexual language; an obscenity-trial helped fuel its fame. One of the most enduringly famous "Beat" works, Kerouac's On the Road (written in 1951), which had much of its objectionable material edited out, was not published until 1957, in a sense capitalizing on the fame brought by the Howl obscenity-trial; Kerouac was subsequently accused of encouraging delinquency. Burroughs' magnum opus, Naked Lunch, which was much more graphic than Howl, likewise went to trial for obscenity after its 1962 American publication. These trials helped to establish that, if anything was deemed to have literary value, it was no longer considered obscene.^[2]

4. Origin of name

Author Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948, generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time; the name came up in conversation with the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation.") The adjective "beat" came to the group through the underworld association with Herbert Huncke where it originally meant "tired" or "beaten down." Kerouac expanded the meaning of the term, over time adding the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat," "beatific," and the musical association of being "on the beat:" the Beat Generation was on the bottom, but they were looking up. Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive."

Kerouac's claim that he had identified (and embodied) a new trend analogous to the influential Lost Generation might have seemed grandiose at the time, but in retrospect it's clear that he was correct – though possibly largely because the prophecy was self-fulfilling.^[3][4]

5. Early meetings in 1940s and early 1950s

The original "Beat Generation" writers met in New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, (in 1948) and later (in 1950) Gregory Corso (they are sometimes called the "New York Beats" though only Corso was from New York). Perhaps equally important were the less obviously creative members of the scene, who contributed to the writers' intellectual environment and provided them with subject matter: There was Herbert Huncke, a drug-addict and petty thief who met Burroughs in 1946 and introduced the core members of the New York Beats to the junky life style and junky lingo, including the word "beat:" Lucien Carr, who was key to introducing many of the central figures to one another; and Hal Chase, an anthropology student from Denver, who, in 1947, introduced into the group Neal Cassady, the focus of many beat works (notably Kerouac's On the Road). Also important were the oft-neglected women in the original circle, including Joan Vollmer and Edie Parker. Their apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan often functioned as a salon (or as Ted Morgan puts it, a "pre-sixties commune"^[5]), and Joan Vollmer, in particular, was a serious participant in the marathon discussion-sessions.

Later, the central figures (with the exception of Burroughs) ended up together in San Francisco in the mid-1950s where they met and became friends with figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Harold Norse, Lew Welch, and Kirby Doyle. There they met many other poets who had migrated to San Francisco because it had a reputation as an important new center of creativity. This included Bob Kaufman who was, according to legend, the first to actually be called a "beatnik." Also of significance were Philip Lamantia, Tuli Kupferberg, and members of the recently dissolved Black Mountain College looking for a new center of communal creativity, poets such as Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Many writers were inspired by the publication of "Howl" and On the Road and decided to join the group. The Beats met most of these writers when they returned to New York: John Wieners, LeRoi Jones, Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman. The New York School of poets (including Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, though Ashbery and Schuyler weren’t quite as closely associated with the Beats), had already been established as a movement in New York; they found much in common with this ever-widening circle and consistently promoted one another's work.

6. Columbia University

The beginning of the Beat Generation is often traced back to Columbia University to the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase, and others in the original circle. Although they were later considered anti-academic artists, the seed for the Beat Generation was planted in a highly academic environment. Many of their early ideas were formed during arguments with professors such as Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. This was the same environment in which some of their classmates, such as Louis Simpson and Donald Hall, became champions of formalism. This is where Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from Arthur Rimbaud) to move away from Columbia University's conservative notions of literature.

They soon met people outside of Columbia University such as Burroughs, Hunke, and Cassady and the new focus became real life experiences in contrast to the academic environment of Columbia. Perhaps the most important early experience that drove many of the members of the Beat Generation apart was Lucien Carr's stabbing of David Kammerer. The stabbing was an incident that Kerouac tried to capture twice, once in his first novel The Town and the City and then again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz.
Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1914; making him roughly ten years older than most of the other original beats. While still living in St. Louis, Burroughs met David Kammerer, and thus began an association presumably based on their shared homosexual orientation and intellectual tendencies. As a boys' youth-group-leader in the mid-1930s, David Kammerer had become infatuated with the young Lucien Carr (with what encouragement, if any, it is difficult to say). Kammerer formed a pattern of following Carr around the country as Carr attended (and was expelled from) different colleges. In the fall of 1942, at the University of Chicago, Kammerer introduced 17-year-old Lucien Carr to William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs was a Harvard-graduate who lived off a stipend from his relatively wealthy family. His grandfather had invented the Burroughs Adding Machine, though the amount of wealth in the family is often exaggerated (Kerouac remarked on "the Burroughs Millions," which didn't actually exist^[6]). The three became good friends, whose sprees got Burroughs kicked out of his rooming-house and culminated with Carr confined in a mental ward after an apparent attempted suicide with a gas oven (one version of the story holds that this was a way of avoiding military service). In the spring of 1943, Carr's family moved him to Columbia University in New York, where Kammerer, and then Burroughs shortly followed.
At Columbia, Carr met the freshman Allen Ginsberg, whom he introduced to Burroughs and Kammerer. Edie Parker, another member of the crowd, introduced Carr to her boyfriend Jack Kerouac when he came back from his stint as a merchant marine. In 1944, Carr introduced Kerouac and Burroughs. Kammerer's fixation was obvious to everyone in the circle, and he became jealous as Carr developed a relationship with a young woman (Celine Young). In mid-August, 1944, Lucien Carr killed him with a boy scout knife in what may have been self-defense after an altercation in a park on the Hudson River. Carr disposed of the body in the river. He then sought advice from Burroughs, who recommended that he get a lawyer and turn himself in with a claim of self-defense. Instead, Carr went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon. The following morning, Carr turned himself in, and Kerouac and Burroughs were charged as accessories to the crime. Burroughs got the money for bail, but Kerouac's parents refused to post it for him. Edie Parker and her family came through, with the condition that she and Kerouac be married immediately.
Burroughs had an interest in experimenting with criminal behavior and gradually made contacts in the criminal underground of New York, becoming involved with dealing in stolen goods and narcotics and developing a decades-long addiction to opiates. Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a small-time criminal and drug-addict who often hung around the Times Square area. The beats found Huncke a fascinating character. As Ginsberg put it, they were on a quest for "supreme reality", and felt that Huncke, as a member of the underclass, had learned things that were sheltered from them in their middle-class lives.
In 1949 Ginsberg got in trouble with the law because of this association. Ginsberg let Huncke stay with him for a brief time (as referenced in the line from Howl, "who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the showbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium;") Ginsberg's apartment was subsequently packed with stolen goods. He rode with Huncke to transport these stolen goods which led to a car chase with the police. Ginsberg pleaded insanity and was briefly committed to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon. When committed, Carl Solomon was more eccentric than psychotic.
A fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in some self-consciously "crazy" behavior, e.g. throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Ted Morgan also mentions an incident when he stole a peanut-butter sandwich in a cafeteria and showed it to a security-guard. If not crazy when he was admitted, Solomon was arguably driven mad by the shock treatments applied at Bellevue, and this is one of the things referred to many times by Ginsberg in "Howl" (which was dedicated to Carl Solomon). After his release, Solomon became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel Junky (1953), shortly before another episode resulted in his being committed again.
Neal Cassady
The introduction of Neal Cassady into the scene in 1947 had a number of effects. A number of the beats were enthralled with Cassady — Ginsberg had an affair with him and became his personal writing-tutor; and Kerouac's road-trips with him in the late 40s became a focus of his second novel, On the Road. Cassady is one of the sources of "rapping" - the loose spontaneous babble that later became associated with "beatniks" (see below). Though he did not write much himself, the core writers of the group were impressed with the free-flowing style of some of his letters, and Kerouac cited this as a key influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in his key works (the other obvious influence being the improvised solos of jazz music). On the Road is the book where Kerouac began to write in this manner, and it transformed Cassady (under the name "Dean Moriarty") into a cultural icon: a hyper wildman, frequently broke, going from woman to woman, car to car, town to town; largely amoral, but frantically engaged with life.
The delays involved in the publication of Kerouac's On the Road often create confusion: The novel was written in 1951 — shortly before John Clellon Holmes published Go, and the article "This is the Beat Generation" — and it covered events that had taken place earlier, beginning in the late '40s. Since the book was not published until 1957, many people received the impression that it was describing the late '50s era, though it was actually a document of a time ten years earlier.
The legend of how On the Road was written was as influential as the book itself: High on benzedrine, Kerouac typed rapidly on a continuous scroll of telegraph-paper to avoid having to break his chain of thought at the end of each sheet of paper. Kerouac's dictum was that "the first thought is best thought", and insisted that you should never revise a text after it is written — though there remains some question about how carefully Kerouac observed this rule, at least in the case of On the Road which is sometimes regarded as his "transitional" work. Although Kerouac maintained that he wrote this particular book in one three-week burst, it is clear from manuscript evidence that he had previously written several drafts and had been contemplating the novel for years. Also, the text went through many changes between the final "scroll" manuscript and the published version.
Gregory Corso
In 1950 Gregory Corso met Ginsberg, who was impressed by the poetry that Corso had written while incarcerated for burglary. Gregory Corso was the young d'Artagnan (to use Ted Morgan's phrase^[8]) added to the original three of the core beat writers, and for decades the four were often spoken of together, though later critical attention for Corso (the least prolific of the four) waned. He gained some notoriety for his tragicomic poetry, such as "Bomb" and "Marriage."
Some time later there was much cross-pollination with San Francisco-area writers (Ginsberg, Corso, Cassady, and Kerouac each moved there for a time). Lawrence Ferlinghetti (one of the partners who ran the City Lights Bookstore and press) became a focus of the scene as well as the older poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose apartment became a Friday night literary salon. Ginsberg was introduced to Rexroth by an introductory letter from his mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth's. When Ginsberg was asked by Wally Hedrick to organize the famous Six Gallery reading in October 1955, Ginsberg had Rexroth serve as master of ceremonies. In a sense, Rexroth was bridging two generations. This reading included the first public performance of Ginsberg's poem Howl and thus it is considered one of the most important events in the history of the Beat Generation. It brought East Coast and West Coast poets together in public performance for the first time, and the reading quickly sparked a legend and led to many more readings around California by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. Soon after the Six Gallery reading, Ferlinghetti wrote Ginsberg a letter, saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a brilliant career. When do I get the manuscript?" This was an adaptation of Emerson's comment about Whitman's poetry, a prophecy of sorts that Howl would bring as much energy to this new movement as Whitman brought to 19th-century poetry. This is also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement, since the publication of Howl and the subsequent obscenity-trial brought nationwide attention to many of the other members of this group.
An account of the Six Gallery reading forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, a novel whose chief protagonist is a character based on one of the poets who had read at the event, Gary Snyder (called "Japhy Ryder" in Kerouac's roman à clef). Most of the people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds and they found Snyder to be an almost exotic individual, with his rural and back-country experience, and his education in cultural anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti has referred to him as "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation". One of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums is Buddhism, and the different attitudes that Kerouac and Snyder have towards it. The Dharma Bums undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the West.

7. Women of the Beat Generation

There is typically very little mention of women in a history of the early Beat Generation, and a strong argument can be made that this omission is largely a reflection of the sexism of the time, rather than a reflection of the actual state of affairs.^[12] Joan Vollmer (later, Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs) was clearly there at the beginning of the Beat Generation, and all accounts describe her as a very intelligent and interesting woman. But she did not herself write and publish, and unlike the case of Neal Cassady, no one chose to write a book about her (though she appears as a minor figure in multiple authors' works). She has gone down in history as the wife of William S. Burroughs, who was killed by him in a shooting-incident (often called "accidental") that resulted in Burroughs' conviction in Mexico of homicide, but with sentence suspended.

Gregory Corso insisted that there were many female beats. In particular, he claimed that a young woman he met in mid-1955 (Hope Savage, also called "Sura") introduced Kerouac and Ginsberg to subjects such as Li Po and was in fact their original teacher regarding eastern religion (this claim must be an exaggeration, however: a letter from Kerouac to Ginsberg in 1954 recommended a number of works about Buddhism).
Corso insisted that it was hard for women to get away with a Bohemian existence in that era: they were regarded as crazy, and removed from the scene by force (e.g. by being subjected to electroshock). This is confirmed by Diane DiPrima (in a 1978 interview):
Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know Barbara Moraff is a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them ODed and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania ...
However, a number of female beats have persevered, notably Joyce Johnson (author of Minor Characters); Carolyn Cassady (author of Off the Road); Hettie Jones (author of How I Became Hettie Jones); Joanne Kyger (author of As Ever; Going On; Just Space); Harriet Sohmers Zwerling (author of Notes of a Nude Model & Other Pieces;) the aforementioned Diane DiPrima (author of This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Memoirs of a Beatnik, Loba, and many others); and ruth weiss (author of DESERT JOURNAL and many other poems and films). Later, other women writers emerged who were strongly influenced by the beats, such as Janine Pommy Vega (published by City Lights) in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the early 1970s, and performance poet Hedwig Gorski in the early 1980s.

8. Collaboration

Collaboration and mutual inspiration were an important part of the Beat Generation's literary process. Allen Ginsberg was a promoter of the works of a number of the other members of the Beat Generation. He considered himself a pro bono literary agent for all of his friends and for those with similar ideas. For example, he was instrumental in getting William S. Burroughs's first book, (Junkie,) published. Ginsberg had encouraged Burroughs to write in the first place. He did extensive editing on Naked Lunch, with some help from Kerouac and others. Burroughs and Ginsberg also collaborated on the book The Yage Letters. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs collaborated early on a parody of hardboiled detective fiction called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs collaborated in a book of cut-up poems "Minutes to Go" while living in Paris.

William Burrough's "Naked Lunch" was edited by Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso, while they lived in Paris Hotel in 1956. Early in 1956 Jack Kerouac, in Tangiers, had assisted Burroughs in putting his prose "fragments" into novel form. Jack Kerouac incorporates many important Beat figures as characters in his novels. Two of his most important novels, On the Road and The Dharma Bums, feature characters based on Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, respectively, as their chief protagonists.
The Beats often provided titles for one another's work. The naming of two important works is the subject of Beat legend. Ginsberg gives Kerouac credit for the name "Howl," even though the original manuscript Ginsberg sent to Kerouac had already been given the title "Howl for Carl Solomon." It's uncertain why Ginsberg would give Kerouac credit, but it's not surprising, considering the nature of their relationship. Kerouac also provided Burroughs with the title Naked Lunch, and, according to legend, when Ginsberg asked what it meant, Kerouac said he didn't know but they'd figure it out. Ginsberg gives some suggestions in a later poem: "On Burroughs' Work." He says, "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." Ginsberg also supposedly coined the term "the subterraneans" (an early attempt at a name for the Beat Generation), which became the title of an early Kerouac novel that was later made into a movie. Ginsberg suggested "Gasoline" to Corso, as the title for his second volume of poetry.
Members of the Beat Generation provided subject-matter for much of Allen Ginsberg's poetry. Neal Cassady in particular was a favorite subject of Ginsberg. Ginsberg dedicates his most famous poem, Howl, to Carl Solomon; Cassady and Solomon are specifically referenced throughout the poem. Other Beat Generation figures referenced in Howl include: Kerouac, Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Tuli Kupferberg, and many more. He dedicated his first collection of poems, Howl and Other Poems, to Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, and originally Lucien Carr, though his name was taken off later at Carr's request. The dedication included all of their accomplishments including then unpublished On the Road, Naked Lunch, and Cassady's The First Third. Carr requested his name be taken off because he didn't want the attention. He dedicated many of his other poetry collections and some individual to poems to other Beat figures, including: Huncke, Cassady, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Frank O'Hara. Many of them were also subjects of specific poems within these collections.^[21]
Kerouac used a "roman à clef" style, in which he used thinly disguised Beat characters and described their encounters. Allen Ginsberg appears in five novels as Irwin Garden, and under other names in four more books. William Burroughs is Bull or Will Hubbard, or Old Bull in four books. Corso is Raphael Urso in two books. Corso's letters indicate that Kerouac (as Leo Percepied) originally wrote the ending of The Subterraneans with Percepied killing Yuri Gilgoric (Corso) for sleeping with his African American girlfriend Mardou. Corso warned Kerouac that he would go "down in history as a murderer," and Kerouac rewrote the ending to spare Gilgoric's life by not hitting him with a raised cafe table. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady collaborated on a poem called "Pull My Daisy." A section from "Pull My Daisy" was one of the first poems Ginsberg published. When Kerouac and Ginsberg later collaborated on a film with photographer Robert Frank based on a script by Kerouac for a play called The Beat Generation, they found that the title had already been copyrighted. They called the film Pull My Daisy instead. The actors included Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, and Larry Rivers (a painter associated with the New York School), and Kerouac did the narration.^[22]Gary Snyder dedicated several poems to Lew Welch and has mentioned other Beat figures, such as Kerouac and Philip Whalen, in his poetry.Frank O'Hara in his conversational poems often talks about eating lunch with "LeRoi" (LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka) and often alludes to other Beat writers, such as Ginsberg and John Wieners. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka occasionally refers to other Beats in his writing (Snyder and Kerouac, for example). For a time in New York, Baraka and Diane DiPrima edited a magazine called Yugen, which published many of the Beat writers.^[23]

9. Literary legacy

Many novelists who emerged in the 1960s and 70s, many labeled postmodernists, were closely connected with older Beats and considered latter day Beats themselves, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove.) Other postmodern novelists, Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)^[39] and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) for example, considered the Beats to be major influences though they had no direct connection. William S. Burroughs is considered by some a forefather of postmodern literature; he inspired many later postmodernists and novelists in the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by the Beat Generation's focus on free speech and egalitarianism, Amiri Baraka went on to found the Black Arts movement which focused more specifically on issues in the African American community. Other notable writers associated with this movement include Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Nikki Giovanni.

Since there was such a heavy focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have been influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman as major influences.^[40]
The Postbeat Poets are a direct out-growth of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and later at Brooklyn College not only carried on the activist social justice legacy of the Beats, but also created its own body of experimental and culturally-influencing literature by Anne Waldman, Antler (poet), Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire (author), Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark and others.

Lecture 9. American literature from the 1959s

1. Science fiction

Science fiction, sometimes called "speculative fiction," has long provided "thought experiments" which imagine alternative worlds where current developments -- social, political, scientific, technological, cultural -- are pushed to their logical extremes. In some cases, these visions of the future embrace the dominant American ideology of technological utopianism -- that is, the belief that technological advances (especially in communication and transportation) will dramatically improve human social and cultural relations. Other writers have offered more pessimistic and apocalyptic visions, linking advanced technologies with concentrations of political power, coercive mechanisms of social control, or weapons of mass destruction. Science fiction writers have rarely sought to "predict" the future in a literal sense. Rather, they have used their imagined futures to question, challenge, and comment on changes they observe or intuit in contemporary society. One notable exception: Arthur C. Clarke, recognized as a significant influence on the development of global communications satellites.

As a genre, science fiction has provided a space for popular debates about change, including increasingly changes in our media culture. Science fiction writer Alan E. Norse explains, "The science fiction reader is encouraged by his reading not to fear or dread change, but rather to accept it as a fresh and exciting challenge. After all, science fiction seems to say, the winds of change -- however violent they may seem -- are of man's making in the first place, and it should be within man's power to temper them." Norse argues, provocatively, that science fiction readers may be better able to adjust to "future shock" because they have worked through alternative futures in their imaginations and have come to accept that change is part of all human societies.
From the start, the American science fiction tradition has been linked to the increasingly visible role of communications media in our national culture. The technological utopians, a group of late 19th-century social reformers who wrote utopian fictions about future societies, often saw improvements in communication as vitally linked to the restructuring of the social order. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887), for example, included speculations about credit cards and broadcasting.
Hugo Gernsback, founder of the American science fiction tradition, was himself a key figure in promoting radio as a socially transforming technology, and the earliest American science fiction appeared alongside articles on amateur radio and popular science. The writers who contributed to Gernback's magazine Amazing Stories were technophiles, translating the ideals of the technological utopians into colorful entertainment.
The Gernsbackian tradition reached its zenith at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where corporations and governments sought to construct their own visions of "the world of tomorrow," based on technological utopian ideologies. It is no coincidence that the first public display of television in the United States occurred at the 1939 Fair, in the context of this highly publicized attempt to translate the visions of science fiction into reality. The World's Fair moved science fiction's speculations about the future out of the pages of the pulps and into broader national consciousness, where it would remain for the remainder of the 20th century.
The representations of technology, science, and media in American science fiction grew darker in the wake of the Second World War. Science fiction of the 1950s, including works by Henry Kuttner, Cordwaner Smith, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, offered satirical perspectives on the rise of television and advertising. Not unlike the radical cultural critics of the Frankfort School, these writers were disturbed by the ways in which the mediated culture of the post-War era seemed to encourage mass conformity and blind consumption. Yet at the same time, such fiction also envisions characters that use new media to resist dominant social institutions and to challenge state and corporate power -- themes that will find their fullest expression in the cyberpunk of the 1980s and 1990s. Other science fiction writers have examined the place of surveillance technologies and information management in the modern political and economic bureaucracy.
The 1960s saw the broadening of science fiction to embrace new social and political visions and to reach new constituencies. Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler embraced science fiction themes and imagery as part of their attempt to anticipate change in our technological environment. Their theoretical works were read alongside science fiction written by and for novels the counter-culture and helped to shape the images of mediated culture that ran through the genre. This period also saw the increased participation of women as both readers and writers of science fiction, resulting in alternative visions of utopian futures, grounded in transforming social relations rather than changing technologies and in alternative conceptions of media. Some of this fiction deployed a feminist critique of the media's exploitation of women's bodies and emotions.
William Gibson's Neuromancer (1989) and subsequent "cyberpunk" short stories and novels have dealt with the "digital revolution," the expanding roles of multinational corporations, the proliferation of alternative subcultures, and the centrality of information management to modern life. Gibson coined the term, "cyberspace," and his conceptions of virtual reality have influenced the development of digital media. Some science fiction writers, such as Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card, and Vernor Vinge, have published powerful critical essays on real-world media in addition to their speculative fiction about the future of media.

2. Female writers

Marge Piercy (1936- ) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet best known for fiction with a feminist slant. Her writing stems from a political commitment that began in the 1960s in the Vietnam anti-war movement.

Her early novels, such as "Small Changes"(1973), have been used as historical documents in women's studies'courses. Often her protagonists, like Connie in "Woman on the Edge of Time"(1976), are women trying to establish some control over worlds that are increasingly restrictive. Her latest novel, "He, She, and It", was published in 1991.
Like her novels, her poetry – such as "The Moon Is Always Female"(1980) – explores feminism and feminity.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) The life of poet Elizabeth Bishop has been filled with honors coveted by many writers--among them the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Although she was less prolific than many writers of her generation, each new work was a unique event; her work was never became monotonous or stereotypical. During 35 years of writing, Elizabeth Bishop published five slim volumes of poetry. Robert Lowell, in a a sonnet addressed to her, spoke of her working methods: ``Do/you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps/or empties for the unimaginable phrase...?'' A lover of geography and of detail, of the sly joke and unexpected image, Bishop somehow combines a very personal feel with one of distance, as if offering the poems while wishing herself not to be seen. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father was a builder who died when she was one year old, and her mother shortly thereafter suffered a breakdown and spent the rest of her life in a sanitorium. Bishop was raised by relatives and during World War I lived in Nova Scotia. She went to Vassar, and in 1945 her first book, ``North and South'' won the Houghton Miffling Prize. An inheritance from her father enabled her to travel fairly widely; she lived for many years in Brazil, returning to this country in 1970 when the inheritance ran out, to take a teaching job at Harvard.

The still explosions on the rocks,

the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.